The Idiot

Prince Myshkin returns to Russian high society after years in a Swiss sanatorium, treated for a condition that leaves him prone to seizures — and utterly unprepared for the cruelty, vanity, and calculation of the people he meets. He tells the truth without flinching, forgives without condition, and falls in love without strategy, in a world where every one of those instincts is a liability. Torn between two women — the proud, self-destructive Nastasya Filippovna and the fierce, uncompromising Aglaya — Myshkin becomes the still center of a novel that spirals toward catastrophe around him. Dostoyevsky set out to portray a genuinely good man and place him inside a real society to see what would happen to him; the answer he arrived at is one of the most devastating in all of literature. The Idiot is a tragedy built entirely out of kindness, and it will break your heart in ways cruelty never could.