The Idiot

He is kind, honest, and utterly incapable of surviving in the world. They call him an idiot.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's most heartbreaking novel is the story of a man who tries to be good, and is destroyed by the very people he tries to save.

Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin returns to Russia from a Swiss sanatorium, where he has been treated for epilepsy. He is pure of heart, without guile, incapable of cruelty. He sees the good in everyone. He is also, by the standards of St. Petersburg society, an idiot. He falls in love with the beautiful, tormented Nastasya Filippovna, a woman destroyed by her childhood seduction by a rich lecher. She loves him but cannot accept his love; she believes she is unworthy. She runs away with the violent, passionate Rogozhin, who will eventually murder her. Myshkin tries to save everyone—Nastasya, Rogozhin, the family that takes him in—and fails at everything. In the final scene, he sits beside the body of the woman he loved, stroking her hair, no longer capable of speech.

This is Dostoevsky at his most tender and tragic: a novel about the impossibility of goodness in a fallen world, the beauty that cannot survive contact with reality, and the idiot who is the only true Christian among the healthy.

• Published in 1868–69, written in the aftermath of personal tragedy (the death of Dostoevsky's infant daughter)

• Dostoevsky called Myshkin "a perfectly beautiful man"—his attempt to portray Christ in a contemporary setting

• One of the most influential novels of the twentieth century, admired by Nietzsche, Kafka, and David Foster Wallace

Available in multiple formats:

• Paperback & Hardcover: Beautifully designed print editions presenting the complete, unabridged text made to last.

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• Audiobook: Professionally narrated, complete and unabridged, available on all major audiobook platforms.

A beautifully crafted edition for your shelf, your device, or your ears—or the perfect gift for anyone who knows that the kindest person in the room is usually the one who gets hurt.

About the Author

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian novelist, short story writer, and journalist, widely regarded as one of the greatest writers in world literature. Born in Moscow, the second of seven children, he was the son of a military doctor who was murdered by his own serfs. Dostoevsky studied engineering but turned to writing. In 1849, he was arrested for his involvement in a progressive literary circle, sentenced to death, and subjected to a mock execution—the trauma of which shaped his entire worldview. He spent four years in a Siberian prison camp, followed by exile. The Idiot was written during a difficult period: Dostoevsky was in debt, grieving the death of his daughter, and struggling with his own epilepsy. The novel's portrait of Myshkin—an epileptic like Dostoevsky—is deeply autobiographical. The novel was not well received by Russian critics, who found it chaotic and overwrought. But it has since become one of his most beloved works. His other major works include Notes from Underground (1864), Crime and Punishment (1866), Demons(1872), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). He died of a pulmonary hemorrhage in 1881 and is buried in the Tikhvin Cemetery in St. Petersburg.