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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• Part III, Chapters V-VII

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

• Part IV, Chapters IV-V

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

• 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.