Published in 1868-69, The Idiot began as Dostoyevsky's attempt to portray what he called "a positively beautiful man", someone genuinely good placed inside the corrupt machinery of Russian society to see what happens. Prince Myshkin returns to Russia after years in a Swiss sanatorium being treated for epilepsy, arriving in St. Petersburg with almost no money and a transparency of character that people alternately admire, exploit, and find unnerving. He becomes entangled with two women: Nastasya Filippovna, a famous beauty who was seduced and ruined as a teenager by her guardian and now courts her own destruction with ferocious self-awareness; and Aglaya Yepanchin, young and brilliant, drawn to Myshkin in ways she cannot reconcile with her family's social ambitions.
Myshkin's goodness is not passive. He sees through people clearly, says what he perceives without social calculation, and responds to suffering directly rather than performing the appropriate emotion. This makes him socially disastrous. When he tells a general that he finds him more interesting after hearing about his worst moment, he means it as genuine engagement; the general experiences it as an insult. Nastasya Filippovna understands Myshkin better than anyone and rejects him anyway, because she is convinced that someone genuinely good cannot desire someone as damaged as she believes herself to be, and Dostoyevsky leaves open the question of whether Myshkin's presence made her situation better or worse.
The novel raises a question that has no clean answer: whether innocence of purpose can survive contact with a social world organized around calculation and self-interest. Myshkin ends as he began, broken, returned to the Swiss clinic, unable to function. The society that broke him, meanwhile, continues. Dostoyevsky does not frame this as straightforwardly tragic; there is a dark comedy running through the novel's social scenes that prevents it from becoming merely a martyrdom narrative. The question the book leaves open, whether someone like Myshkin is a failed saint or simply a person unsuited to the world as it exists, is one readers tend to argue about long after they finish the book.
Leo Tolstoy's wife Sofia copied War and Peace by hand seven times, the manuscript ran to over 1,200 pages.
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