The Idiot

Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin returns to Russia after years in a Swiss sanatorium — penniless, childlike in his frankness, incapable of guile or grudge, trusting everyone and judging no one. Into this transparent goodness Dostoevsky pours the whole acquisitive, vain, status-hungry world of Petersburg society, and the collision is the novel.

Two figures draw the prince into the storm: the beautiful, proud, self-destroying Nastasya Filippovna, and the merchant’s son Rogozhin, whose violent passion for her can end only one way. Myshkin loves her with pity even as he is drawn toward the clever young Aglaya, who could give him a happiness he seems fated never to hold. Around them gathers a crowd of spongers, schemers, and dying nihilists, each measured against the one man among them who wants nothing for himself.

Built around great scandal-scenes of rising hysteria and shot through with Dostoevsky’s feverish realism, The Idiot asks whether pure goodness can survive in the world — or only draw destruction toward it. Its saintly hero acts as a moral mirror in which every other character stands revealed, and over the whole book hangs Holbein’s Dead Christ, the abyss over which all its faith is suspended.

This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation by Eva M. Martin, paired with an editor’s foreword on the novel’s composition, meaning, and method, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.