The Idiot

My intention is to portray a really beautiful soul. Dostoevsky Despite the harsh circumstances besetting his own lifeabject poverty, incessant gambling, and the death of his firstborn childDostoevsky produced a second masterpiece, The Idiot, just two years after completing Crime and Punishment. In it, a saintly man, Prince Myshkin, is thrust into the heart of a society more concerned with wealth, power, and sexual conquest than the ideals of Christianity. Myshkin soon finds himself at the center of a violent love triangle in which a notorious woman and a beautiful young girl become rivals for his affections. Extortion, scandal, and murder follow, testing the wreckage left by human misery to find man in man. The Idiot is a quintessentially Russian novel, one that penetrates the complex psyche of the Russian people. They call me a psychologist, wrote Dostoevsky. That is not true. Im only a realist in the higher sense; that is, I portray all the depths of the human soul.