The Idiot

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Published by: Oxford University Press, 2008

Description: "The main idea of the novel is to depict the positively good man, There is nothing more difficult than this in the world, especially nowadays." (Dostoevsky) Into a compelling real portrait of nineteenth-century Russian society Dostoevsky introduces his ideal hero, the saintly Prince Myshkin. The tensions subsequently unleashed by the hero's innocence, truthfulness, and humility betray the inadequacy of his moral idealism and disclose the spiritual emptiness of a society that cannot accommodate him. Mushkin's mission ends in idiocy and darkness, but it is the world that is rotten not he.