Idiot

"My intention is to portray a really beautiful soul." -- Dostoevsky Despite the harsh circumstances besetting his own life -- abject poverty, incessant gambling, and the death of his firstborn child -- Dostoevsky 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. I'm only a realist in the higher sense; that is, I portray all the depths of the human soul." Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821-1881) was born in Moscow, the son of a surgeon. Leaving the study of engineering for literature, he published Poor Folk in 1846. As a member of revolutionary circles in St. Petersburg, he was condemned to death in 1849. A last-minute reprieve sent him to Siberia for hard labor. Returning to St. Petersburg in 1859, he completed his masterpiece Crime and Punishment seven years later; it remains one of the most powerfully realistic works of fiction. His other works from this period include The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. Domestic trials, financial troubles and illness troubled his later years, which he spent abroad as well as in St. Petersburg as a Slavophil journalist.