Dostoevsky’s The Idiot – a masterpiece

When I finished reading “The Idiot”, by the brilliant writer Fyodor Dostoievsky, the protagonist of the story, Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, reminded me of another immortalized character by Dostoievsky: Alyosha, from the book “The Brothers Karamazov”. Many of Dostoevsky’s characters have a certain similarity throughout his work. We can note that Dostoevsky’s main idea when writing “The Idiot” was to describe the beauty of a human being, more than that, a common being, who has his own vision of everyone around him, who does not obey the canons of realism, but the opposite of that, it is a fantastic being. It is this being that bears similarities to Christ, but with idiotic features of Don Quixote. Shall we get to the story?

To understand a little about Mychkin’s personality, let’s start at the beginning. It all starts with three strangers on a train heading to Petersburg. A prince named Mychkin is returning from a Swiss sanatorium where he has stayed for the last few years being treated for an epilepsy problem. He encounters a wise-cracking Rogozhin, who harbors an unhealthy obsession with a beautiful young woman named Nastasya Filipnovna, and a government official named Lyébediev, who figures prominently throughout the novel.

The basis of the novel is Mychkin, who is not a brilliant man and goes through society simply. But he is a good, honest, friendly and pleasant person. Because of this “naivety” everyone sees him as an idiot. To give you an idea, when he comes into a large inheritance, he is blackmailed by a man who claims to be the illegitimate son of Mychkin’s benefactor. But when the man’s story is unmasked, Mychkin befriends rather than punishes the culprit and his accomplices. In this society, the protagonist dialogues in his simple way, on the one hand, with the great society made up of elegant people, the world of the rich and powerful and conservative; and, on the other hand, with the fury of young anarchists and nihilists and their inexorable hostility. In this shootout the prince is always alone, exposed to fire from both. Mychkin reveals his sweetness, his childish nature. Alone, he accepts the affront, the insult, and is always ready to accept all the blame, taking upon himself all the responsibility on his shoulders on both sides. Both the rich and the revolutionaries. But he accidentally ends up stepping on everyone’s toes. Everyone has common resentments against each other, they are united in darkness.

by Pandora_box_Hesiod