The Idiot

28 hrs. 33 min.

Classics

Language Russian

Author Fyodor Dostoevsky

Narrator Ivan Agapov

Description

The novel “The Idiot” holds a special place in Dostoevsky’s body of work. While his other works center on tragic images of rebellious heroes—“negators”—in “The Idiot,” the writer chose, as his main character, by his own definition, a “positively beautiful,” ideal person, striving to bring harmony and reconciliation into the awkwardness of public life, and guided him through searches and trials that also lead to a tragic end.

Such a task was sharply emphasized by Russian public life of the 1860s. It was solved in various ways by Turgenev, Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy, and Leskov. Under these conditions, Dostoevsky had to feel a passionate desire to draw a portrait of a modern Russian person endowed with high moral perfection.

In the everyday-life and psychological contrasts of the novel, the processes of social and moral degradation are depicted sharply and vividly: the growth of wealth for some and the impoverishment of others; the destruction of the “respectable” noble family image—processes that repeatedly attracted Dostoevsky’s attention after the reforms. The reader finds themselves together with the hero in the wealthy mansion of General Yepanchin, in the home of the merchant Rogozhin, at a party with the “kept woman” Nastasya Filippovna, and also in the modest wooden house of the official Lebedev. Rogozhin and Myshkin, Nastasya Filippovna and Aglaia, Ippolit and the group of “modern nihilists” embody different forms of Russia, of the Russian person in his impulses and search for truth, in good and in evil.

The novel was conceived and written abroad, to which the writer went with his wife in April 1867. Before leaving, he received an advance for the future work from the editorial office of the journal “Russian Messenger.” Having visited Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Baden-Baden, Dostoevsky, on August 16 (28), 1867, wrote from Switzerland to A. N. Maikov: “Now I’ve arrived in Geneva with ideas in my head. The novel exists, and, if God helps, it will come out a big thing and maybe not bad at all. I love it terribly and will write it with pleasure and anxiety.”

Comparing Russian and Western European life, Dostoevsky reflected on the fate of his homeland and noted: “Russia <…> seems here more vivid to our brother” (XXVIII, book 2, 206). Dostoevsky left with the feeling of deep internal shifts taking place in Russia in the second half of the 1860s. Believing that this period—“so close to the upheaval and reforms,”—was almost more important than Peter’s time, Dostoevsky understood the contradictions of post-reform Russian reality, in which the remnants of the old combined in strange ways with new forms of development. Pointing to the “extraordinary fact of the independence and unexpected maturity of the Russian people upon encountering all our reforms,” the writer expected “a great renewal.”