0090 | The Idiot – Fyodor Dostoevsky

Context: Started reading this in The Idiot restaurant in St. Petersburg.

REVIEW
This is my third Dostoevsky and I’m really beginning to develop a taste for this guy and starting to understand more about why he writes and what he has to offer us who read it.

Prince Myshkin aka the idiot of the title is the stable benchmark by which all the other characters in this novel are to be judged. He is constantly misunderstood by them and, at times, it’s easy to make the same mistake. This is partly because the novel was written in stages and Fyodor himself was unsure of the plot (not that there is much of one) and the development of the characters.

Nevertheless, the characters all portray, with the exception perhaps of Kolya and of course Myshkin himself, some extremity of high class Russian society of the time be it pride or avarice or criminality.

There are some great bits of philosophy as Dostoevsky becomes a narrator at times, especially the beginnings of Part Four which was my favourite part of the book.

And, in the end, the very idea of madness itself is challenged as the book finishes itself off rather abruptly with something quite dramatic.

Definitely worth a read but a meditative read for the sake of understanding the characters and how they all reflect different aspects of ourselves. Not a page turner and not one for the Dan Brown brigade.

FIRST LINE
About nine o’clock on a late November during a thaw, the train from Warsaw was nearing Petersburg at full speed.

QUOTES

young ladies… put on blue eye glasses… to persuade themselves that in putting on their spectacles they immediately acquire convictions of their own.

It is enough for a man to feel in his heart a droplet of humanitarianism and benevolent emotion to be persuaded that no one feels as deeply as he and that he stands at the vanguard of civilisation.

I don’t understand how anyone can walk by a tree and not be happy at the sight of it.

all this being abroad… is only fantasy, and all of us, when we’re abroad, we are only fantasy.

CLOSING LINE
“Mark my words, you’ll see for yourself!” she concluded almost angrily, as she parted with Yevgeny Pavlovitch.

RATING:
terrible > poor > mediocre > okay > good > very good > excellent > superb