The Idiot

After spending five years in a sanatorium, Prince Myshkin joins the Petersburg Society. Through his previous isolation, he has preserved childlike behavior, which makes him, in the eyes of the others, a very strange person which cannot be taken for serious. His naivete, openness, and honesty are helplessly exposed to the social intrigues, his ideal of the lived philanthropy meets with incomprehension. Myshkin’s attempts to help people as well as his attempts to free himself from the social and personal entanglements into which he is involved are doomed to failure.

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"The Idiot" is one of the most famous works by the Russian writer Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoevsky (1821-1881). It was first published as a continuation novel between 1868 and 1869 in the magazine „Russki Westnik“.

The protagonist Myshkin is an experiment by Dostoevsky: What happens when an absolutely naive innocent person, who always wants to see and promote only the best in other people, gets into the entanglements of (Petersburg) society? It is not for nothing that Dostoevsky named the figure of Prince Myshkin in his work records „Prince Christ.“

This edition is based upon Eva Martin’s translation from Russian into English. The eBook corresponds to about 930 book pages.