The Idiot

A haunting parable of innocence undone, The Idiot stands as Dostoevsky’s most personal–and most disquieting–novel. It follows the gentle and guileless Prince Myshkin, recently returned to St Petersburg from treatment in a Swiss sanatorium, whose radical honesty and spiritual clarity set him fatally at odds with the vanities and cruelties of Russian high society. His presence unravels a web of greed, desire and wounded pride as he becomes entangled with the beautiful, self-destructive Nastasya Filippovna and the tormented Rogozhin. Can goodness persist in a world built on deceit? Or does purity, in such a world, become its own kind of delusion?