The Idiot

Summary

The Idiot tells what happens when a man of complete goodness and simplicity enters the money-driven society of St. Petersburg in the late 1860s. Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, the last of an old noble family, returns to Russia after four years in a Swiss sanatorium, where Dr. Schneider treated him for the epileptic illness that left him so slow as a child that people called him an idiot. On the train he meets Parfyon Rogozhin, the dark, passionate heir to a merchant fortune, who is obsessed with the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna. Myshkin calls on his distant relative Lizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchin, wife of General Epanchin, and charms her and her three daughters, Alexandra, Adelaida and the proud youngest, Aglaia, with stories of Switzerland, of a death sentence he saw carried out in Lyons, of a man reprieved at the scaffold, and of Marie, a shamed village girl whom he taught the children to love. Nastasya Filippovna, orphaned and brought up by the wealthy Totsky, who later took advantage of her position, is now to be married off to the general's ambitious secretary Ganya Ivolgin with a dowry of seventy-five thousand roubles. At her name-day party Myshkin offers to marry her himself and is revealed to have inherited a fortune; Rogozhin arrives with a hundred thousand roubles; Nastasya throws the packet into the fire, dares Ganya to pull it out, and leaves with Rogozhin. Six months later Myshkin returns from Moscow. In Rogozhin's gloomy house he sees a copy of Holbein's Dead Christ, and the two exchange crosses as brothers; that evening Rogozhin attacks him with a knife on a hotel staircase, and only a sudden epileptic fit saves him. At the summer resort of Pavlovsk the prince is surrounded by the scheming clerk Lebedyev, a group of young radicals who claim money from him, and the consumptive youth Ippolit, who reads a long confession of despair and attempts to shoot himself with a pistol that fails to fire. Myshkin and Aglaia fall in love and are informally engaged, but at a gathering of high society he breaks a precious Chinese vase, makes an impassioned speech on Russia and Christ, and has a fit. When Aglaia and Nastasya meet face to face, Myshkin cannot abandon the suffering Nastasya, and Aglaia runs from the room. Nastasya agrees to marry him but flees from the church door with Rogozhin. Myshkin finds Rogozhin in his house in Petersburg, where he has killed her; the two men keep watch together through the night beside her body. Rogozhin is sentenced to fifteen years in Siberia, Aglaia makes an unhappy marriage abroad, and Myshkin, his mind broken, is taken back to Dr. Schneider. Dostoevsky wrote the novel abroad and serialized it in The Russian Messenger in 1868-69.

Plot or Argument

• Part I, Chapters I-VII: the prince arrives

  The train to Petersburg, where Myshkin meets Rogozhin and the clerk Lebedyev; his visit to General Epanchin; his stories of executions and of Marie for Lizaveta Prokofyevna and her daughters; first sight of Nastasya Filippovna's portrait.

• Part I, Chapters VIII-XVI: Nastasya Filippovna's name-day

  Myshkin lodges with the Ivolgin family, sees Ganya slap him in anger, and attends Nastasya Filippovna's party, where guests confess their worst deeds, the prince proposes, Rogozhin brings a hundred thousand roubles, and the money goes into the fire.

• Part II, Chapters I-V: Rogozhin's house

  After six months in Moscow, Myshkin visits Rogozhin's dark house in the Gorohovy Street, sees the copy of Holbein's dead Christ, tells of the drunken soldier and the peasant mother, exchanges crosses with Rogozhin, and is attacked on the hotel stairs as a fit seizes him.

• Part II, Chapters VI-XII: Pavlovsk and the poor knight

  At Lebedyev's summer villa the Epanchins visit the recovering prince; Aglaia recites Pushkin's ballad of the poor knight; Burdovsky and his friends demand money as the supposed son of Myshkin's benefactor Pavlishtchev, and Myshkin answers their insults with patience and generosity.

• Part III: Ippolit's confession and Aglaia's choice

  On Myshkin's birthday Ippolit, dying of consumption, reads his long written explanation, including his horror at the Holbein painting, and tries to shoot himself; Aglaia appoints a meeting on the green seat in the park; Nastasya writes to Aglaia urging her to marry the prince.

• Part IV, Chapters I-VII: the engagement evening

  General Ivolgin's tall tales and his death after a stroke; Myshkin's unofficial engagement to Aglaia; the evening party at which he denounces Roman Catholicism, proclaims a Russian Christ, breaks the Chinese vase and falls in a fit.

• Part IV, Chapters VIII-XII: the two women and the end

  The meeting of Aglaia and Nastasya Filippovna, Myshkin's turning toward Nastasya, the abandoned wedding, the night vigil with Rogozhin beside Nastasya's body, and the conclusion that tells what became of each character.

Characters

• Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, protagonist

  A gentle, truthful young nobleman just returned from treatment in Switzerland, whose compassion unsettles everyone around him.

• Nastasya Filippovna Barashkov, heroine

  A beautiful, proud and deeply wounded woman, wronged in youth by her guardian Totsky, torn between self-destruction and the prince's pity.

• Parfyon Semyonovitch Rogozhin, rival

  The passionate heir to a merchant fortune, Myshkin's sworn brother and the man consumed by his love for Nastasya.

• Aglaia Ivanovna Epanchin, beloved

  The youngest and most beautiful Epanchin daughter, proud, mocking and in love with the prince.

• Lizaveta Prokofyevna Epanchin, Myshkin's relative

  The general's impulsive, warm-hearted wife, who recognizes the prince as a kindred child-like spirit.

• General Ivan Fyodorovitch Epanchin, patron

  A self-made general and businessman, father of the three daughters.

• Gavril Ardalionovitch Ivolgin (Ganya), suitor

  The general's ambitious secretary, willing to marry Nastasya Filippovna for money.

• General Ardalion Ivolgin, Ganya's father

  A drunken, boastful retired general given to fantastic stories.

• Kolya Ivolgin, Ganya's younger brother

  An eager, loyal schoolboy who becomes the prince's devoted friend.

• Ippolit Terentyev, dying youth

  A bitter, brilliant eighteen-year-old in the last stages of consumption who rebels against a death he cannot escape.

• Lebedyev, clerk and landlord

  A cunning, servile, oddly devout petty official who interprets the Apocalypse and lets his villa to the prince.

• Afanasy Ivanovitch Totsky, Nastasya's former guardian

  A rich, refined sensualist who wants to buy his way out of his past with her.

Lessons

• The positively good man in a fallen world

  Dostoevsky set out to portray a wholly good man and placed him among people driven by money, pride and passion. Myshkin tells the truth, forgives insults and sees the best in everyone, and he is loved, mocked and exploited by turns. The novel does not decide whether his goodness fails or whether the world fails it, and that question is the reader's to weigh.

  • Why do so many characters both laugh at Myshkin and confide in him?
  • Does Myshkin's goodness help Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaia, or does it make things worse for them?
  • Aglaia calls the poor knight a serious Don Quixote. How does that comparison fit Myshkin?

• Pity and passion

  Myshkin loves Nastasya Filippovna with compassion, Rogozhin with possessive passion, and the prince himself fears that his pity may be stronger than Rogozhin's love. The novel examines whether pity can save a person who wants to destroy herself, and what happens when it is divided between two people.

  • Why does Nastasya Filippovna keep running from Myshkin to Rogozhin?
  • Myshkin believes compassion is the chief law of human life. Does the novel bear him out?
  • At the meeting of the two women, why does Myshkin turn to Nastasya, and what does that choice cost?

• Facing death

  Myshkin's stories of the guillotine and the reprieved man (drawn from Dostoevsky's own mock execution in 1849), Ippolit's revolt against his early death, and the Holbein painting of the dead Christ all ask how a person should live knowing death is certain. The novel holds despair and faith side by side without hurrying to settle them.

  • What did the reprieved man resolve to do with his life, and did he keep his resolution?
  • Why does the Holbein painting threaten faith for Rogozhin and Ippolit?
  • How does Myshkin answer Ippolit, and is his answer enough?

• Money and dignity

  Fortunes pass from hand to hand throughout the book: Totsky's seventy-five thousand, Rogozhin's hundred thousand in the fire, Myshkin's inheritance, Burdovsky's claim. Dostoevsky shows people buying and selling one another, and also shows the strange freedom of those, like Nastasya at her party, who refuse to be bought.

  • Why does Nastasya Filippovna throw the hundred thousand roubles into the fire?
  • Why does Ganya faint rather than pull the money out?
  • How does Myshkin respond to Burdovsky's false claim, and why do the others find his response maddening?

Context

The novel is set in St. Petersburg and the summer resort of Pavlovsk a few years after the emancipation of the serfs (1861), when new money, railway speculation, legal reforms and young radical ideas were unsettling the old social order. Dostoevsky draws on his own experience: his reprieve from a firing squad in 1849, his epilepsy, and his sight of Hans Holbein the Younger's Dead Christ in the Tomb at Basel in 1867.

Composition

Dostoevsky wrote The Idiot while living abroad with his wife Anna Grigoryevna, in Geneva, Vevey, Milan and Florence, under pressure of debt and grieving the death of their infant daughter Sofia in 1868. In a letter of January 1868 to his niece Sofia Ivanova he described his aim as portraying a positively beautiful man, and named Don Quixote as the most complete such figure in Christian literature. The novel ran in The Russian Messenger from January 1868 to February 1869 and appeared as a book in 1874. The library text is Constance Garnett's English translation (Heinemann, 1913), from the 1918 printing; her footnotes are omitted, and a few OCR slips may remain.

Reception

Contemporary reviewers found the novel puzzling and less unified than Crime and Punishment, and Dostoevsky himself felt he had not fully realized his idea. In the 20th century it came to be counted among his greatest works, studied for its portrayal of a Christ-like figure, of epilepsy and of a society losing its moral center, and adapted for film by Akira Kurosawa (1951) and others.

Comparisons

• crime-and-punishment

  Written just before The Idiot, Crime and Punishment follows a man who kills to test a theory; The Idiot follows a man who will not harm anyone, and both novels end with a murderer facing Siberia.

• the-brothers-karamazov

  Alyosha Karamazov is Dostoevsky's later, more hopeful attempt at a good man in the world, a novice sent out by his elder rather than an innocent returning from a sanatorium.

• don-quixote

  Dostoevsky named Cervantes's knight as the model of a positively good man in literature, and Aglaia hides Myshkin's note in a copy of Don Quixote and recites Pushkin's poor knight in his honor.

• les-miserables

  Dostoevsky admired Hugo's novel; Bishop Myriel's mercy transforms a convict, while Myshkin's mercy cannot stop the tragedy around Nastasya Filippovna.

• the-death-of-ivan-ilyich

  Ippolit's rage at dying young and Tolstoy's account of a judge's last illness are two Russian studies of how a person faces certain, unwanted death.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• Myshkin's three Swiss stories in Part I (the Lyons execution, the reprieved man, Marie and the village children) and how each foreshadows later events.
• Nastasya Filippovna's portrait, which Myshkin studies and kisses before he ever meets her.
• The copy of Holbein's dead Christ in Rogozhin's house, and its return in Ippolit's confession.
• The exchange of crosses with Rogozhin in Part II and the knife that follows.
• Aglaia's recitation of Pushkin's poor knight and the hidden note in Don Quixote.

Key terms and names

Idiot

The name Myshkin was called as a sick child; in the novel it marks both his illness and the way the world sees his simplicity.

Epilepsy and aura

Myshkin's falling sickness, preceded by moments of intense light and harmony that he wonders may be the highest form of life.

Name-day

The feast of the saint whose name one bears, celebrated in Russia like a birthday; Nastasya Filippovna's party is the climax of Part I.

Holbein's Dead Christ

Hans Holbein the Younger's 1521-22 painting of Christ's body in the tomb, which Dostoevsky saw at Basel and placed at the center of the novel.

The poor knight

A ballad by Pushkin about a knight devoted to a vision of the Virgin; Aglaia applies it to Myshkin.

Exchange of crosses

A Russian custom by which two men become sworn brothers in Christ, as Myshkin and Rogozhin do in Part II.

Pavlovsk

A summer resort near Petersburg with a park and music pavilion, where Parts II-IV largely take place.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Why has Myshkin been living in Switzerland, and what brings him back to Russia?
2. Comprehension What happens to the hundred thousand roubles at Nastasya Filippovna's name-day party?
3. Comprehension What saves Myshkin from Rogozhin's knife on the hotel staircase?
4. Interpretation Why does Myshkin say that the Holbein painting might make some people lose their faith, and why does Rogozhin keep it?
5. Interpretation What does the story of Marie and the Swiss children reveal about Myshkin's way of loving people?
6. Interpretation Why does Myshkin turn to Nastasya Filippovna rather than Aglaia when the two women meet?
7. Big Question Can a perfectly good person live in an imperfect world without causing harm, or does goodness require prudence as well as compassion?
8. Big Question Is pity a form of love, or can it stand in love's way?

Faith Connections

• 1 Corinthians 1:18-27 (Scripture)

  Paul's teaching that God chose the foolish things of the world to confound the wise frames the prince called an idiot, who sees more truly than the clever people around him.

• Luke 15:7 (Scripture)

  The joy in heaven over one sinner who repents lies behind the peasant mother's words about God's gladness, which Myshkin calls the whole essence of Christianity.

• Matthew 18:1-4 (Scripture)

  Christ's call to become as little children is the key to Myshkin's childlike nature and to his love of the Swiss village children.

• Erasmus, The Praise of Folly (Great Conversation)

  Erasmus's closing praise of the holy folly of Christians offers a Renaissance parallel to the holy fool tradition that shapes Myshkin.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: If a man of perfect compassion and truthfulness enters a society ruled by money, pride and passion, he will be loved and exploited but will not by himself be able to save those who want to destroy themselves; therefore compassion alone, without the conversion of others, cannot prevent tragedy, though it remains the highest law.

Rhetorical device: doubling. Characters come in mirrored pairs: Myshkin and Rogozhin, who exchange crosses; Nastasya and Aglaia, who face each other in Part IV; the Holbein painting answered by the peasant mother's smile in Part II, Chapter IV.

Debate: Resolved: that Prince Myshkin's compassion does more harm than good to the people around him.

Memory Work

Compassion was the chief and perhaps only law of all human existence.

God has just such gladness every time he sees from heaven that a sinner is praying to Him with all his heart, as a mother has when she sees the first smile on her baby’s face.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Trace the Holbein painting through Part II and Part III and explain how it tests the faith of Rogozhin, Ippolit and Myshkin.

Comparison with The Brothers Karamazov: Compare Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov as Dostoevsky's two portraits of a good man: what does Alyosha have that Myshkin lacks?

Medical Lens

The Idiot is among the most important literary accounts of epilepsy, written by an author who had the illness himself. Myshkin's condition is treated in Switzerland by Dr. Schneider at a private establishment, a picture of the mid-19th-century residential cure for nervous and mental illness. Dostoevsky gives the prince a detailed aura: heightened light and clarity, a sense of harmony and reconciliation, then the cry and the fall; the scene on the hotel staircase shows a convulsive attack interrupting a knife attack. Later writers have discussed whether such experiences correspond to what neurologists call ecstatic auras, often linked with the temporal lobe; any such reading of the novel is interpretive. Ippolit's consumption follows the period's understanding of tuberculosis as a fatal wasting disease of the young, and his attempted suicide and written confession are a study of despair facing a terminal illness. Myshkin's reflections on the condemned man draw on Dostoevsky's own mock execution in 1849, an early literary account of the psychology of imminent death. General Ivolgin's drinking and death after a stroke, and the prince's final relapse into incomprehension and return to Schneider, complete the medical picture.

• Part I, Chapters II and V

  Myshkin's accounts of an execution by guillotine and of a man reprieved before a firing squad, focusing on the mind in its last minutes.

  Death Dying
• Part II, Chapter V

  The extended description of Myshkin's pre-seizure states, his reflection on whether a diseased state can yield a true insight, and the fit on the hotel staircase.

  Epilepsy Seizures Altered States
• Part III, Chapters V-VII

  Ippolit, dying of consumption, reads his written explanation and attempts suicide with a pistol that has no cap.

  Tuberculosis Consumption Suicide
• Part IV, Chapters IV-V

  General Ivolgin's drinking, collapse in the street and death after a stroke.

  Alcohol Death Dying
• Part IV, Chapter VII and Conclusion

  The seizure at the Epanchins' party, and Myshkin's final loss of understanding and return to Dr. Schneider's care in Switzerland.

  Epilepsy Seizures Asylum Institution Physicians Doctors

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Is Myshkin a failure? Argue from the ending, considering what happens to Nastasya, Aglaia, Rogozhin and the prince himself.

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation Myshkin and Ippolit might have had the morning after Ippolit's failed suicide attempt.

• Classroom

  Display Holbein's Dead Christ in the Tomb and read the Part II and Part III passages about it; discuss why Dostoevsky made a painting so central.

• Fiction

  Tell the name-day party in Part I from the point of view of a servant watching the money burn.

Further Reading

• Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, Joseph Frank

  One-volume abridgment of Frank's five-volume life, with chapters on the writing of The Idiot.

• Dostoevsky Reminiscences, Anna Dostoevsky

  Memoir by the novelist's wife, including the years abroad when the novel was written.

• The Falling Sickness: A History of Epilepsy from the Greeks to the Beginnings of Modern Neurology, Owsei Temkin

  Classic history of epilepsy, giving the medical background to Myshkin's illness.

• Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

  The novel Dostoevsky completed just before beginning The Idiot.