Author Description

"It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool's paradise." ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot The title is a sarcastic allusion to the novel's major character, Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, a young man whose kindness, open-hearted innocence, and guilelessness cause many of the more worldly individuals he meets to wrongly believe he lacks knowledge and understanding. Dostoevsky sought out to portray "the absolutely excellent and lovely man" in the character of Prince Myshkin. The novel investigates the implications of placing such a distinctive character at the center of worldly society's conflicts, wants, passions, and egoism, both for the man himself and for others with whom he gets engaged. The Idiot is "the most personal of all Dostoevsky's great works, the book in which he expresses his most private, treasured, and holy convictions," according to the author. It includes tales of some of his most harrowing personal experiences, such as epilepsy and mock execution, as well as moral, spiritual, and philosophical issues that arose as a result of them. His major motive for creating the novel was to test his own greatest ideal, real Christian love, in the furnace of modern Russian society. After his great portrayal of a guilty man in Crime and Punishment,The Brothers Karamazov, Demons Dostoevsky set out in The Idiot to portray a man of pure innocence