Novel: The Idiot

Overview
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot follows Prince Lev Myshkin, a young, epileptic nobleman whose radical innocence collides with the intrigues, vanities, and cruelties of St. Petersburg society. Returning to Russia from a Swiss sanatorium, he carries no money, little social savvy, and a disarming compassion. His presence exposes the hidden rivalries and humiliations of the people he meets, especially around two women, Nastassya Filippovna and Aglaya Epanchin, whose fates become entangled with his own. The novel tests whether a “positively good” person can live in a world ruled by pride, money, and desire.

Plot
On the train to Petersburg Myshkin meets Parfyon Rogozhin, a passionate merchant’s son obsessed with the beautiful Nastassya Filippovna, a woman compromised by her former patron Totsky. In the Epanchin household Myshkin’s frankness charms General and Mrs. Epanchin and their daughters, including the spirited Aglaya. He also meets Ganya Ivolgin, who is pursuing Nastassya for money and status. At a fateful birthday gathering Nastassya mocks her suitors, flings a huge bundle of cash into the fire, and dares anyone to retrieve it; Rogozhin, intoxicated by jealousy and desire, claims her. Myshkin offers marriage to save her from degradation, but she recoils from his purity and slips away with Rogozhin.

The summer in Pavlovsk complicates everything. Myshkin’s epileptic seizures coexist with moments of luminous clarity. Aglaya oscillates between admiration and scorn for him, tested by gossip and the family’s anxieties. The consumptive nihilist Ippolit delivers his “necessary explanation,” a furious meditation on death under Holbein’s “Dead Christ,” and botches a theatrical suicide attempt. Rogozhin, maddened by possession and fear of losing Nastassya, stalks Myshkin and once nearly murders him, yet is disarmed by the prince’s embrace and shared crosses. At last, a marriage between Myshkin and Nastassya is arranged; on the wedding day her shame and self-loathing surge, she flees with Rogozhin, and jealousy ends in her murder. Myshkin spends the night beside Rogozhin and the body in a terrible vigil of pity. Rogozhin is arrested; the prince collapses back into idiocy and is returned to the Swiss clinic.

Characters and relationships
Myshkin’s goodness is not weakness but an uncompromising empathy that shames and unsettles others. Rogozhin is his dark double: a man of ferocious, possessive love. Their bond, sealed by exchanged crosses, frames the novel’s inquiry into spiritual love versus erotic obsession. Nastassya, both victim and provocateur, believes herself irredeemable and veers between seeking salvation in Myshkin and plunging into Rogozhin’s destructive passion. Aglaya, the proud youngest Epanchin, projects an ideal of chivalric purity onto Myshkin, only to recoil when faced with his unconditional compassion for Nastassya. Around them whirl opportunists, dreamers, and the disgraced, each revealed by how they respond to Myshkin’s unguarded candor.

Themes and motifs
The novel opposes Christian mercy to a society organized by vanity, calculation, and humiliation. Money functions as a corrosive spectacle, the burning banknotes scene lays bare the commodification of people’s worth. Beauty inspires both reverence and annihilation: Holbein’s Christ haunts Ippolit as proof that matter crushes spirit, while Myshkin insists that “beauty will save the world,” a belief constantly tested by Nastassya’s fate. Epileptic “ecstasy” prefigures catastrophe, suggesting a tragic rhythm in which moments of grace are bordered by collapse. The “idiot” becomes a holy fool whose truth-telling exposes lies yet cannot reform the world that destroys what it cannot assimilate.

Aftermath
The Epanchins are scandalized; Aglaya later marries a bogus aristocrat and is unhappy; Rogozhin awaits judgment; Nastassya is beyond redemption. Myshkin, emptied of language and will, returns to the asylum, his silence a bleak answer to the question the novel poses. The Idiot leaves a vision of a society incapable of receiving pure goodness without either mocking, exploiting, or crucifying it.