The Idiot
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In his second novel, Dostoevsky sought to portray "a positively beautiful man, " a saintly paragon in contrast to the murderer Raskolnikov of his first novel. After a stay in a Swiss sanitarium, Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin returns to an unrecognizable Russia obsessed with material and carnal pleasures. His own goodness clashes with this world as he becomes entangled in love affairs with two very different women. Through Myshkin's struggle, in which his corruption seems fated, Dostoevsky offers a brilliant indictment of a society that cannot countenance virtue.
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's masterful translation of The Idiot is destined to stand with their versions of Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Demons as the definitive Dostoevsky in English. After his great portrayal of a guilty man in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky set out in The Idiot to portray a man of pure innocence. The twenty-six-year-old Prince Myshkin, following a stay of several years in a Swiss sanatorium, returns to Russia to collect an inheritance and "be among people.” Even before he reaches home he meets the dark Rogozhin, a rich merchant's son whose obsession with the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna eventually draws all three of them into a tragic denouement. In Petersburg the prince finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with money, power, and manipulation. Scandal escalates to murder as Dostoevsky traces the surprising effect of this "positively beautiful man” on the people around him, leading to a final scene that is one of the most powerful in all of world literature.