The Idiot

What would a truly good, truly innocent man look like in the corrupt world of nineteenth-century Russia? What would happen to him? Dostoevsky spent years trying to imagine a character of Christlike compassion and purity, and the result is Prince Myshkin — epileptic, guileless, incapable of social calculation, and constitutionally unable to look at any human being without feeling the full weight of their suffering.

Into this man’s life Dostoevsky introduces Nastasya Filippovna — one of literature’s most devastating characters, a woman of extraordinary beauty who has been destroyed by her own history and cannot accept love — and Rogozhin, who loves her with a passion that is indistinguishable from the desire for destruction. The collision between these three people generates one of the most emotionally overwhelming narratives in world literature.

Dostoevsky’s central question — whether goodness can survive in a fallen world, or whether it will simply be crucified by it — is never resolved. The novel ends in catastrophe. And yet it is also, somehow, a novel about the necessity of trying. David Magarshack’s translation is the standard English text. Published by Penguin Classics.