Hedgehog

In an SRO stuffed with people living on the margins of society is Leo, a young man who spent years in a mental institution because his epilepsy was judged a mental illness. The experience left Leo with a morbid attachment to a fictional character that suffered the same misdiagnosis. This fascination often causes him to revert to a Myshkin like personality in his relations with his fellow residents. But Leo is so likable that even the down and out inmates of this 'free' asylum willingly accept being identified as characters from the novel. One resident has closely read the work and thus is able to cue the others as to their roles when necessary. But the residents have such serious problems of their own that an unavoidable intermixing of their personal lives with those of characters from 19th century Russian high society inexorably leads to a real life Dostoevskian crisis.