The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky: A Summary of the Story, the Characters and the Ideas
What it is about
The Idiot was published in instalments in the journal The Russian Messenger across 1868 and 1869. The title is ironic. The central character, Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, is not stupid at all. He is open-hearted, guileless and entirely without calculation, and the worldly people around him mistake that for a lack of intelligence and insight.
Dostoevsky set himself a deliberately difficult task. He wanted to portray what he called "the positively good and beautiful man", then drop that man into the middle of a society driven by money, status and appetite, and see what happened to him and to everyone he touched.
The novel opens on a train bound for Saint Petersburg on a cold November morning. Myshkin, in his mid-twenties and descended from one of the oldest noble lines in Russia, is returning to Russia after four years in a Swiss clinic, where he was treated for severe epilepsy. On the journey he meets Parfyon Rogozhin, a young merchant who has just inherited a very large fortune from his father and who is consumed by his obsession with a famous society beauty, Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova. A gossiping civil servant named Lebedyev joins the conversation and promptly attaches himself to the new heir.
Myshkin has come to call on a distant relative, Lizaveta Prokofyevna, wife of the wealthy General Epanchin. He arrives in the middle of a business arrangement. The General and his partner, the aristocrat Totsky, are trying to marry Nastasya Filippovna off to the General's assistant, Ganya Ivolgin, with a payment of 75,000 rubles attached. Totsky had been Nastasya Filippovna's guardian after she was orphaned, and he abused that position to groom her for his own use. She now sees him and the whole arrangement with merciless clarity, and she has promised to give her answer at her birthday party that evening.
Myshkin takes a room with Ganya's family and watches the household tear itself apart over the proposed match. Nastasya Filippovna arrives to inspect her possible new relatives. Rogozhin turns up with a crowd of drunks and openly starts bidding for her, reaching a hundred thousand rubles. The scene collapses into humiliation and violence, and Myshkin, stepping between people twice, takes a slap meant for someone else. From there the book moves towards the birthday party, where Nastasya Filippovna must choose.
The main characters
Myshkin is the still point. He speaks with startling candour to people who are used to hints and manoeuvres, holding forth on his illness, on Switzerland, on art, on death and on capital punishment. He reads faces and tells people what he sees in them. Asked about love, he recounts a long story about Marie, a downtrodden woman in Switzerland whom he and a group of children befriended when everyone else condemned her. That story tells you his entire moral method: compassion offered to the person others have written off.
Rogozhin is his opposite, all heat and possession, ready to buy what he wants. Nastasya Filippovna is the novel's wound, a woman damaged by Totsky and now using her beauty and her tongue as weapons, swinging between contempt and self-contempt. Ganya wants the money and hates himself for wanting it. The Epanchin daughters, Alexandra, Adelaida and the sharp, unpredictable Aglaya, bring curiosity and mockery in equal measure. Around the edges sit Lebedyev, trading in gossip, and General Ivolgin, a drunk with a gift for elaborate lies.
The themes
Dostoevsky's main motivation was to put his own highest ideal, true Christian love, into the crucible of contemporary Russian society and see whether it survived. Goodness here is not safe. It attracts, disturbs and destabilises, and the people drawn to Myshkin do not always benefit from the attraction.
Corruption runs through the plot as a transaction. A woman's future is priced, countered and raised at a party. Madness and illness are not metaphors for Dostoevsky. He had epilepsy himself, and he had once faced a mock execution, and both experiences feed directly into the book's thinking about mortality, judgement and the value of a single moment. Love appears in two forms that cannot be reconciled: Myshkin's pity and Rogozhin's hunger.
Why it still matters
Joseph Frank called it the most personal of all Dostoevsky's major works, the book in which he set down his most intimate and cherished convictions. Because Dostoevsky was writing serially and testing an idea rather than executing a plan, he often could not predict where the plot was going. The result is a famously awkward structure. Gary Saul Morson put it well: the novel "violates every critical norm and yet somehow manages to achieve real greatness."
Dostoevsky himself thought the experiment had not fully worked. He wrote to Nikolay Strakhov that much of it was written in a hurry and too diffuse, adding, "I do not stand behind the novel, but I do stand behind the idea." It remained his favourite of his own books.
It suits readers who want the arguments rather than a tidy shape, and who are willing to follow a messy, brilliant book that asks whether genuine goodness can survive contact with the world.
