The Idiot: A Novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

[pioneer]

Dostoyevsky's next major novel, Idiot (1868â€"69; The Idiot), represents his attempt to describe a perfectly good man in a way that is still psychologically convincingâ€"seemingly an impossible artistic task. If he could succeed, Dostoyevsky believed, he would show that Christ-like goodness is indeed possible; and so the very writing of the work became an attempt at what might be called a novelistic proof of Christianity.

The work's hero, Prince Myshkin, is indeed perfectly generous and so innocent as to be regarded as an idiot; however, he is also gifted with profound psychological insight. Unfortunately, his very goodness seems to bring disaster to all he meets, even to the novel's heroine, Nastasya Filippovna, whom he wishes to save. With a remarkably complex psychology, she both accepts and bitterly defies the world's judgment of her as a fallen woman. Ippolit, a spiteful young man dying of consumption, offers brilliant meditations on art, on death, on the meaninglessness of dumb brutish nature, and on happiness, which, to him, is a matter of the very process of living. Columbus, he explains, was happy not when he discovered America but while he was discovering it. - source: Britannica Encyclopedia