Summary: The Idiot

The GIST

The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a novel about what happens when a truly good man walks into a world that runs on money, vanity and desire. First published in instalments in the journal The Russian Messenger in 1868 and 1869, it follows Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, a gentle young nobleman whose openness and lack of guile lead nearly everyone he meets to take him for a fool. The title is ironic. Myshkin is perceptive, thoughtful and deeply intelligent. He is simply incapable of the calculation that everyone around him mistakes for sense.

Dostoevsky set himself a task he had long been afraid to attempt: to portray, in his own words, "the positively good and beautiful man," and then to test that man against the passions and egoism of modern Russian society. He wrote it in desperate circumstances, in exile from his creditors, moving between four cities in Switzerland and Italy, evicted five times, losing what little he had at roulette, suffering severe epileptic seizures, and grieving a baby daughter who died at three months. The biographer Joseph Frank called it the most personal of all his major works. Dostoevsky thought the experiment only partly succeeded, yet it stayed his favourite. "I do not stand behind the novel," he wrote, "but I do stand behind the idea."

The Story

On a cold November morning, a train is pulling toward Saint Petersburg. In one of its carriages sits a young man in his mid-twenties, a descendant of one of Russia's oldest noble lines. Prince Myshkin has spent the past four years in a Swiss clinic being treated for severe epilepsy, and he is coming home to a country he barely knows, to look up a distant relative and see about a matter of business.

Across from him sits his opposite: Parfyon Rogozhin, a merchant's son of fierce, passionate intensity who has just inherited an enormous fortune. Rogozhin can talk of only one thing, a woman named Nastasya Filippovna, a dazzling society beauty with whom he is obsessed and on whom he means to spend every ruble. Listening in is Lebedyev, a gossiping civil servant who knows everyone's business and promptly attaches himself to the rich man. Before the train has even arrived, the novel's fatal triangle is in place.

In the city, Myshkin calls on his relative Lizaveta Prokofyevna, the imperious, warm-hearted wife of the wealthy General Epanchin. In the general's office he walks into a piece of ugly business. The general and his partner, the aristocrat Totsky, are arranging for the general's ambitious young assistant, Ganya Ivolgin, to marry Nastasya Filippovna. The reason is shameful. Totsky became her guardian when she was orphaned as a child and used that power to make her his mistress. Now a grown woman who sees exactly what was done to her, she has become an embarrassment to him, and he is offering 75,000 rubles to be rid of her so that he can marry one of the general's daughters. Ganya secretly hates her and wants the money. She has promised her answer that very evening, at her birthday party. Ganya shows the Prince her photograph, and Myshkin is struck by the dark beauty of the face, and by the suffering he reads in it.

Then he meets the Epanchin women: Lizaveta Prokofyevna and her three daughters, Alexandra, Adelaida and the youngest, the proud and lovely Aglaya. They expect a simpleton and are disarmed instead. He talks with complete candour about his illness, about Switzerland, about art and philosophy, about capital punishment, about love and death and the shortness of life, and even about donkeys. He tells them of Marie, a poor, disgraced village girl in Switzerland whom he befriended, together with a band of children, when everyone else had cast her out and condemned her. Then he reads their characters from their faces, and startles the room by remarking that Aglaya is almost as beautiful as Nastasya Filippovna.

He takes a room in the crowded Ivolgin apartment, home to Ganya's long-suffering mother, his sister Varya, his young brother Kolya, and his father, a drunken old general who tells magnificent lies. The family is at war over the shameful marriage when Nastasya Filippovna herself sweeps in, mocking and magnificent. Then Rogozhin arrives with a rowdy gang and begins openly bidding for her, ending at a hundred thousand rubles. In the uproar Ganya goes to strike his sister, the Prince steps between them, and Ganya slaps him across the face. The room freezes. Myshkin's response is not anger. He turns to Nastasya Filippovna and tells her quietly that this is not who she really is, and for a moment her mask slips.

That night comes one of the great scenes in literature. At the birthday party, Nastasya Filippovna asks the uninvited Prince, a man she met hours ago, whether she should marry Ganya. He says no, and she announces that she will follow his advice. Rogozhin bursts in with his hundred thousand in hand. And then Myshkin, gently and in earnest, offers to marry her himself, revealing that he is about to come into a large inheritance. She is moved, more than she can bear. What she does next with Rogozhin's money, the fireplace and the greedy Ganya is unforgettable. Then she leaves with Rogozhin, and the Prince goes after them.

Six months pass. Nastasya Filippovna runs from one man to the other and back, unable to accept Myshkin's compassion and unable to bear Rogozhin's possession. When the Prince returns to Petersburg he visits Rogozhin's house, where a copy of Holbein's painting of the dead Christ hangs, a picture Rogozhin says is destroying his faith. Rogozhin admits he has beaten her and speaks of worse. Even so, the two men part as friends. Hours later, Rogozhin is waiting on a hotel stairway with a knife. What saves the Prince is his illness: at that instant an epileptic fit throws him down, and his attacker flees.

The story then moves to the summer resort of Pavlovsk, where everyone has taken a dacha. Here the novel becomes a whirl of visits, quarrels and scandals. A group of insolent young radicals turns up to demand money from the Prince on behalf of a supposed illegitimate son of his late benefactor. The claim is proved false, and Myshkin offers to help them anyway, which infuriates his friends. Among them is Ippolit Terentyev, seventeen years old and dying of consumption, clever, bitter and starved for love. At the Prince's birthday gathering Ippolit reads aloud a long confession, his "Essential Explanation," arguing that in a universe ruled by blind, indifferent nature the only free act left to him is to end his own life at sunrise. The reading ends in a scene at once pitiful and absurd.

Meanwhile something tender is growing. Aglaya, who mocks the Prince constantly and recites a Pushkin poem about a "poor knight" at his expense, is falling in love with him, and he with her. In her company he feels a simple joy he has never known. But Nastasya Filippovna has not gone away. She appears in a carriage or in a crowd to throw out some shocking piece of news, she strikes an officer across the face with a riding whip, and she writes Aglaya strange, passionate letters begging her to marry the Prince. She seems determined to make him happy with someone else, and unable to let him go.

The Epanchins decide to present Myshkin to high society at a formal dinner. Aglaya, anxious, sarcastically tells him to be sure to wave his arms about and break her mother's priceless Chinese vase. Her anxiety infects him, and the evening turns into a slow-motion disaster as he is carried away by passionate speeches about faith and Russia. And still the real crisis is ahead. Aglaya insists on meeting her rival face to face. The two women, the Prince and Rogozhin come together in one room, and Myshkin is forced to choose between the woman he loves and the woman he pities. What follows, and where it leads all four of them, is the devastating final movement of the book.

What It's Really About

The question at the centre is simple and merciless: can pure goodness survive in the real world, and does it actually help? Dostoevsky did not know the answer when he began. He set up one scandalous scene after another and watched how each character responded to the Prince, which is why the book sprawls and lurches. One critic observed that it breaks every rule and still achieves greatness.

Myshkin's goodness is not a creed. He does not preach; he simply treats everyone as a person worth loving, and in his presence the barriers of rank drop away. Dostoevsky stressed that, unlike Don Quixote, the Prince is innocent rather than comic. He assumes good in others and so sees them more truly than they see themselves, even while they laugh at him or try to cheat him.

The novel is also a study of three kinds of love. Myshkin loves from compassion. Rogozhin loves with a possessive, instinctive passion. Ganya loves from vanity. Between them stands Nastasya Filippovna, one of fiction's great tragic women, abused as a girl, convinced she is ruined, and too proud to be rescued.

Running beneath it all is a debate between faith and unbelief. Ippolit is the Prince's dark twin, facing the same questions of death and meaning and reaching the opposite answer. For him the Holbein painting shows nature as "a dark, brazen and senseless eternal force." Myshkin does not argue back. He recognizes a suffering boy. Dostoevsky also poured his own life into the book: the epileptic's moment of radiance before a seizure, and the terror of a man facing execution, both of which he had lived through.

Who Should Read It

Read this if you love big, feverish, talkative novels that care more about the soul than the plot, and if you are willing to forgive some sprawl for scenes you will never forget. It is for readers drawn to moral questions, to wounded and magnificent characters, and to the idea that kindness may be both the wisest thing in the world and the most dangerous. Most novels ask what becomes of people who do wrong. This one asks something harder: what becomes of a man who only does good.

This has been a summary of The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST.