3.5⭐️
«زیبایی دنیا را نجات خواهد داد.»
تمام چیزی بود که نیاز داشتم از این هزار صفحه به یاد داشته باشم.
.
.
میرم یکم یوتیوب و اینترنت مقاله و تحلیل بخونم و بشنوم بلکه بتونم بهتر قضاوتش کنم پیش خودم.
اما در طول این کتاب من یک بار هم به ذهنم نرسید که بخوام یا بتونم "به کسی پیشنهادش کنم" میدونین چی میگم.

در کل،
تو شاهکار بودنش شکی نیست
معنا مفهوم فلسفه شخصیت پردازی،
همونطور که ابله پیامبر قرن نوزدهمه،
داستایفسکی هم همچنان پیامبر نویسندگانه.

ولی تو همه‌ی ریویوها میگفتن صد صفحه‌ی آخرش خیلیییی خوب میشه
ولی واسه من چیز خاصی نبود

This hurt a lot and made me feel so much insane despair and made me incredibly sick to my stomach. No one does it quite like Dostoevsky, and I don’t think I will even be close to satisfied with this story until I can reread it.

full rtc, maybe sometime, but for now I need to lie down and ponder.

Do you answer ‘yes’ to any of the following questions?

1. You ever sleep in another person’s house for the first time, not wanting to turn on a light to see your way to the toilet, and run into a wall?
2. You ever been in a public building at night and the power fails, and you run into a wall?
3. You ever been camping with an overcast night and straggle into the woods to take a pee, and run into a wall of shrubbery?
4. You ever been in a leadership reaction course, blindfolded, and run into a wall?
5. You ever been deployed to Qatar in the transition billeting tent at night, not wanting to disturb all the soldiers with your mag-light, and run into a tent wall?

What do these questions have in common? 3 things. One, you’ve lost your primary sense--eyesight. Two, you’ve run into something through which you can’t pass. Three, to continue you must turn east or west. This is exactly how I felt when I read The Idiot. Lost, in a strange place, against a barrier. (preview: it’s all about the translator, paragraph 10)

Then I agonized for a week about posting a review of a piece of monolithic literature to which I award only 2 stars. How the hell, dude, can you award 2 stars to an uber-classic? Did you forget it was Dostoevsky? Do you realize that among your 56 friends on Goodreads that 2 stars is the lowest anyone has rated it? You missed something; you’re ignorant!

And I truly subjected myself to several good harangues. I reread the lengthy, academic foreword and afterword. I thought deeply about the book. I stretched my mind, my cognitive abilities, each time against a wall. I was really concerned about your opinion of me, as a reader, as a consumer of serious literature, as a trustworthy, balanced critic of dense writing.

Then it appeared to me, like a turn in the dark. Screw you!! I’m not writing this for you. I write reviews to capture how I feel about a specific novel at a particular place and time in my life. It’s completely fair to award 2 stars to Dostoevsky. At this particular time in my life--as I realize the Deepwater Horizon oil spill may have been overblown by the media, as I decide whether or not to delete my Facebook account, as I realize Obama’s economic plan is an absolute failure with unemployment remaining above 9% for the next 12 months and home values not rebounding for 36 months, as I wonder if next will be as tough as the previous year raising my 3 young kids--at this particular time in my life, I didn’t very much enjoy The Idiot. This is where I’m at in time and place with The Idiot, and I’m so glad to capture feelings other than a middling 3 stars (which is sometimes a rounding error). 2 stars is harsh, but fair.

I read Crime and Punishment twice, and think The Brothers Karamazov one of the best 5 books I ever read. I’ve been under the spell of Dostoevsky for nearly half my life. So my lean this week into The Idiot was a disappointment.

Here’s what the author said about the book: “There’s much in the novel...that didn’t come off, but something did come off. I don’t stand behind my novel, but I do stand behind my idea.” Authors sometimes give themselves a giant pat on the back, but couch it in self-deprecating language. As if to say the ideas in the novel were so august, so pantheon, so divine that their ability to define or make sense of these ideas with terrestrial words resulted, simply, in a spatchcock of human themes. Ignore the writing. The message is in the idea. Come on, Fyodor, we all know you write like an immortal.

The Idiot is brimming with philosophical inquiry into people’s lives, society, culture, and history. Immutable, transcendent ideas about which Russian writers always grapple. The authors of the foreword/afterword reveal and underscore dozens of themes in the book. They discuss mechanics and perspectives and symbols. They discuss Russian history and the Russian concept of suffering, and how these were adroitly parsed among the characters. And how the characters themselves represented the unique attributes--in splinter form--of the Russian whole.

Well that’s all great. You read it and take from it what you want. I found it tangled, hard to follow, uninteresting. The characters were so weighed down by being representatives of the Russian whole that they failed to be engaging characters by themselves. And so unlike Dostoevsky, I found not a single sentence worth transcribing here. In 660 pages, wow, nothing worth remembering. How unfulfilling. Certainly nothing like THIS powerful, euphonic sentence.

(Important) Because I know Fyodor can bring the noise, it leads me to believe that the translation is faulty, dated. Indeed, I read the version translated originally in 1913 by Olga Carlisle. It’s the staid, orthodox version. Perhaps if I read the translation by Larissa Volokonsky, then I would’ve been in measure with the writing. She won the 2002 Efim Etkind Translation Award for her work on The Idiot, for Chris’akes!! Swoon. Cuss. Paradise Lost! Alas, I won’t reread The Idiot. It’s just too long...and me, I’m too slow a reader. I’ll read The Possessed in a couple years. The experts call it a more traditional story on par with CAP and TBK. Dostoevsky is too fine a writer to abandon, and so I won’t.

Another problem I had with the Carlisle translation was the melodramatic interpretation of character staging. Let me, for example, open the book to page 580--a random choice--and list every instance on both pages where the character staging is electrified.

...got up rather late and immediately recalled...
...first moment she burst into tears...
...the prince at once reassured her...
...he was suddenly struck by the strong compassion...
...Vera blushed deeply...
...she cried in alarm, quickly drawing her hand away...
...went away in a strangely troubled state...
...her father had hurried off...
...Koyla ran in, also for only a minute...
...in a great hurry...
...was in a state of intense and troubled agitation...
...was deeply and violently moved...
...poor boy was thunderstruck...
...quietly burst into tears...
...he jumped up...
...hurriedly inquired about...
...added in haste...
...was predicting disaster...
...was asking pointed questions...
...with a gesture of vexation...
...accursed morbid mistrustfulness...
...in the form of an order, abruptly, dryly, without explanation...
...suddenly turning around...
...and feverishly looked at his watch...

Remember, this came from a total of 1200 printed words. The entire book is similarly charged. I got tired of reading all this ‘juiced’ action. Did Dostoevsky intend 660 pages of melododrama, or was this a translator’s interpretation? I got robbed, man. Bad translation. The review stops here.

داستان حول محور یک شخص ساخته شده، پرنس میشکین یا همون ابله خودمون. پرنس که از کودکی بیمار بوده و پدر و مادرش رو هم از دست داده توسط یک انسان خیرخواه بدون اینکه ما دلیل لطفش رو بدونیم به سوییس برای درمان فرستاده میشه. در سوییس حالش رو به بهبود میره و با یک نامه به روسیه برمیگرده. در قطار با افرادی آشنا میشه و در صحبت ها اسم افرادی میاد که به اضافه ی خانواده ای که پرنس فکر میکنه تنها اقوام اون هستن شخصیت های اصلی داستان رو تشکیل میدن. جدای از داستانهای عشقی جنایی که در کتاب رخ میده و برای فهمیدنش باید هزار صفحه ناقابل رو بخونید شخصیت ابله، شخصیت عجیبیه. شخصیتی به شدت نوع دوست و دست شسته از مال دنیا، احساساتی و بدون احتیاط با نظریات مذهبی سیاسی خاص خودش. سعی میکنه به همه کمک کنه و همه رو ببخشه، و برای کوچکترین کارها بارها عذرخواهی کنه و شاید نمونه ی یک انسان کامل باشه (البته بیشتر شبیه اون بچه مردمه که همیشه پدر و مادر تو سر فرزندانشون میزنن، اونقدری هم که میگن عالی نیست). خلاصه این شخصیت تنها آدم بی شیله پیله داستانه و برای همین هم شده ابله و در بین بقیه دوام نمیاره.ه

A Prince Among Men
"The humor of Dostoyevsky is the humor of a bar loafer who ties a kettle to a dog's tail." W. Somerset Maugham, A Writer's Notebook

Prince Myshkin, this novel's protagonist, immediately came to mind when I recently heard the phrase "a prince among men," well after having read this a few years back.

What happens when you drop into higher society a man with a title but an illness that took him away to Switzerland for all his youth? Dostoevsky wanted to write a novel that answered the question of how society of the day would treat a true innocent, an unmarried man in his mid-20s who does not sin and only has love to give (in Christianity, only One fits that description). To me, this was Dostoevsky's sad, but hopeful parabolic answer. While published in 1869, The Idiot is essentially timeless and remains one of the best novels of all time.

This is the second novel I've read of Dostoevsky in which he depicts the females less than favorably. Understandably so in this novel. The primary basis for the lead female in this book, "Natasha Filippovna," was Polina Suslova with whom Fee-Yo had a relationship while his first wife was sick with consumption. He found Suslova imperious, manipulative, jealous, noting, for example, that she repeatedly demanded he divorce his "consumptive wife." He later wrote of Suslova that she was "a sick selfish woman" who refused to tolerate any imperfection in others and whose "selfishness and self-esteem were colossal." After his first wife's death in 1865, he proposed to Suslova, but she declined. She didn't respect, and rarely read, his books and regarded him as a simple admirer.


Polina Suslova


Of the 3 Dostoyevsky novels I've read (The Idiot/The Brothers Karamazov/Crime & Punishment), the first two depicted ladies unfavorably. The negative depiction of Filippovna in The Idiot was crucial to the story. On the other hand, I found the negativity toward females gratuitous in The Brothers Karamazov.

In any case, I highly recommend this novel, one of my favorites.

Non tenterò nemmeno di commentare L’idiota. Voglio solo esprimere pubblicamente la mia sconfinata ammirazione per Dostoevskij, per colui che ha creato un personaggio gigantesco, sublime, indefinibile eppure definito nella sua complessità, il principe Myskin: è uno sciocco eppure molto intelligente, è sincero nella sua renitenza alle regole ipocrite dell’alta società così ingenua da lasciare sbalorditi ma è anche dissimulatore quando occorre, è sradicato, senza origini, comparso come dal nulla eppure è al contempo cittadino russo a tutti gli effetti, è assennato e saggio eppure a volte appare come un buffone, è apatico e mite ed al contempo iperattivo, è comico in molti suoi atteggiamenti, sempre col sorriso sulle labbra, eppure è uno dei personaggi più tragici che la letteratura conosca. Il principe “idiota”, il “segnato da Dio”, colui che sta al confine tra la follia e la genialità, tra la superficie e la profondità, tra la vita e la morte, è una figura che riempie le pagine della letteratura; io non ho nulla da dire se non inchinarmi davanti al genio russo.

„- Dar Rogojin s-ar căsători [cu Nastasia Filippovna]?
- Cred că și mîine s-ar putea căsători [zise Prințul]; s-ar căsători și, peste o săptămînă, zic eu, ar înjunghia-o” (p.40).

Prințul Mișkin are toate calitățile unui om „cu desăvîrșire minunat”: inocență, franchețe, intuiție a psihologiei celor din jur, capacitate de a anticipa consecințele, bunătate, blîndețe. Din păcate, „clarviziunea” lui e luată de ceilalți în rîs. Sinceritatea lui necruțătoare îi aduce calificativul de „idiot”.

Termenul „idiot / idiota” nu a avut întotdeauna sensul peiorativ de azi. În Evul Mediu, îl desemna pe individul care nu a fost pervertit de școli și lecturi, individul care judecă și gîndește cu mintea lui. Cu acest sens, îl folosește Nikolaus Cusanus în titlurile cărților sale.

Firește, Lev Nikolaevici Mîșkin poate fi caracterizat ca „idiota” (în sens medieval). Dar în romanul lui Dostoievski, termenul e folosit, desigur, cu înțelesul lui difamant: Mișkin e prost, sărac cu duhul, nu știe să-și țină gura, nu respectă discreția, spune tot ce-i trece prin cap, indiferent de urmări. Franchețea lui nesăbuită este, de multe ori, o formă de cruzime. Din acest motiv, Ganea îl lovește, iar Rogojin vrea să-l ucidă. E o nouă ipostază a lui Don Quijote. Cînd oamenii s-au obișnuit cu minciuna și situațiile echivoce, adevărul devine o ofensă și un scandal. Prințul este cu siguranță un „trouble-fête”. După cum exclamă un personaj, „apariția lui produce haos”.

Am putea gîndi că prezența prințului va opri catastrofa din final. Dar nu este deloc așa. Mîșkin nu poate împiedica răul. Mai curînd, îl precipită...

Desigur, Dostoievski și-a pus în Idiotul o problemă mai largă, știm asta din însemnările lui. Oare ce s-ar întîmpla dacă Iisus Christos ar reveni printre noi? Întrebarea l-a obsedat pe autor multă vreme. Un prim răspuns poate fi găsit în romanul de față, celălalt în „Parabola Marelui Inchizitor” din Frații Karamazov. În ambele cazuri, a doua venire ar consemna un eșec. Omul nu mai poate fi salvat de nimeni, Dumnezeu a eșuat. Răspunsul lui Dostoievski e pesimist.

P. S. Cineva a rezumat Idiotul în chipul următor: „Doi bărbați iubesc aceeași femeie, în timp ce două femei iubesc același bărbat”. E imposibil să știm dacă Mîșkin o iubește cu adevărat pe Nastasia Filippovna. Mila nu înseamnă întotdeauna iubire.

P. P. S. Dostoievski a lucrat la Idiotul din decembrie 1867 (se afla în exil la Geneva) pînă în ianuarie 1869. Criticii literari nu au fost deloc entuziasmați de roman. L-au găsit haotic, rău construit, greu de urmărit. Meseria criticului literar e să caute noduri în papură și, cînd nu le găsește, să le inventeze...

This guy is on a morning train to St Petersburg. He knows nobody there. He has no money and no possessions. He’s this close to being a vagabond. But he gets in conversation with this other guy and one meeting leads to another and by ten o’clock that night – 160 pages later – he is telling a lady he never met before not to marry a guy he never met before, and then declaring his own total love for this lady.

That’s right just another day in 19th century Russia, Dosto-style.

If Dostoyevsky was a 21st century writer he would be so rich writing scripts for shows like Desperate Housewives or Days of Our Lives because one thing he was was a natural born soap opera scriptwriter. He produced tremendous shouty thirty page arguments and 50 page carcrash scenes involving 12 outrageously-behaving borderline lunatics, just right for the campier type of tv, but I guess he’d have flounced out of his moneyspinning career on day one when they refused to include one character’s five minute monologue on what it must feel like in the half second when you are watching the guillotine blade begin to descend on your naked neck.



WHAT THIS LONG BOOK IS ABOUT

The Idiot is about this young Prince (it was a minor minor title, not royal or even royalish) who comes to town and gets involved with these train people and their families and kind of gets all entangled. There are two strong female leads (Nastasya and Aglaya), both of whom can bring men to their knees with a single glance, and this leads to many complications. Some of the plot can be summed up by the Lovin’ Spoonful in their 1966 hit “Did you Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?”

Did you ever have to finally decide?
And say yes to one and let the other one ride?
There's so many changes and tears you must hide.
Did you ever have to finally decide?

It may be a bit spoilerish (but you will have forgotten it before you get round to reading this) but these two women finally meet in a showdown that is a 19th century Russian version of the one in A Fistful of Dollars. It's a great scene, one of many.

Also, I should mention one great scene where Nastasya rips a whip out of some nasty guy's hands and smashes his face with it.... go Nastasya!!

DOSTOWORLD

Rich men who rape poor girls don’t generally apologise :

He could not repent of his original action with her as he was a hardened voluptuary

Guys have got poor attitudes to marriage :

Although at last, after agonising hesitations, he agreed to marry the “vile woman” he swore in his soul to take a bitter revenge on her for it and to “harry her to death” later on

People do not think tact is something to even think twice about:

Earlier today I thought you were an out-and-out evildoer… now I see that one can consider you neither an evildoer nor even a very corrupt man. In my opinion, you’re just the most ordinary man there could be.

People are gold medal standard haters :

I hate you more than anything and anyone in the world! I understood and hated you long ago, when I first heard about you, I hated you with all the hatred of my soul.

Women send their boyfriends strange presents :

“Did you receive my hedgehog?” she asked firmly and almost angrily.



TALES OF THE MIDDLE AGES

Comedy flashes all the way through this long strange tale and the funniest part for me was when some people are discussing outbreaks of cannibalism during famines of previous centuries. Somebody says :

One such cannibal, approaching old age, announced of his own accord and without any compulsion that throughout his long and poverty-stricken life he had killed and eaten personally sixty monks and several lay infants…

Later on :

“But could anyone possibly eat sixty monks?” People laughed all round.


THE COMICAL DOSTOYEVSKY NARRATOR

In The Brothers Karamazov and again here the narrator is a bumbling old fart type character who often breaks into the narrative and delivers a speech of his own or says stuff like

Perhaps we shall do no great harm to the vividness of our narrative if we pause here and have recourse to a few explanations

And as the story gets more complicated the narrator frankly gives up trying to understand what’s going on, which I thought was most amusing :

We feel we must confine ourselves to the plain exposition of the facts, as far as possible without particular explanations, for a very simple reason : because we ourselves are hard put to explain what happened.

A RARE WORD

Ten points to the translator David McDuff for using a rare and excellent word

Fanfaronade

Alas, it means “boastful talk” when it should mean something much prettier.
And in general this translation was beautifully readable, as is the book itself.

RATING DOSTO

This is my third big Dostoyevsky book this year and I think The Idiot is overshadowed by Crime & Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov but that’s because they are two of the most extraordinary novels ever. So it’s an unfair comparison. The plot of The Idiot is frenzied and cramful of too many people talking at the same time and trips over itself in the middle (caused I think by Dosto writing to a magazine deadline when he just didn’t know how the story should go) but it’s a hell of a ride so try it some time, say, during a global pandemic.

HOW THE AVERAGE DOSTO CHARACTER BEGINS HIS DAY

In a state of indescribable agitation, bordering on terror

Prince Lev Nicolayevich Myschkin discovered relativity in 1886.

Well, actually the scientific theory of relativity wasn’t discovered until 30 years later, by Albert Einstein, but I don’t think that discovery would have been possible without the relativistic ferment that had started sweeping through Europe in the mid-19th century, with its ultimate CHRISTIAN formulation in The Idiot, in 1886.

Moral chaos is so cataclysmic to conservative spectators. So much so to Prince Myschkin, in fact, that he suffers an enormous three-year nervous collapse. But he comes out of it Reborn.

“Reborn!?” you may say. “Isn’t he just... a little ODD?”

Well listen, if as an intelligent kid you were submitting - along with the rest of intelligent Europe - to the Willy-nilly Transvaluation of all Values, wouldn’t you want to somehow return to your Moral Roots?

And if you didn’t Pooh-Pooh change in any form, like so many mature people do, wouldn’t you try to reason through this enormous alteration in values?

Prince Myschkin does both. He REASONS THROUGH THE CLIMACTERIC OF RADICAL RE-ORIENTATION - from a CHRISTIAN POV.

Something we all should be doing today if we’re believers.

Sure, the sophisticated St Petersburg in-set decides mainly to lead him on - apparent imbecile that he is - into traps of their own devising, but isn’t that what most normal people do today with an oddball: feed him enough rope to hang himself with?

But these worldly sophisticates have a “don’t go there” mindset to new ideas. Unless they’re new FUN ideas. They are intellectually and morally stuck. And so the nutty prince is like a breath of fresh air to them, in a funny sort of way!

Bigotry wasn’t born yesterday. It was born when someone decided to take a small, SAFE pathway through the perils of life. And so many have - alas! - followed him.

But Prince Myschkin has just emerged, barely breathing, from a total moral collapse in a world of ethical relativism. More power to him, I say - at least he’s not scared of the world’s shadows anymore.

For he’s now emerged with a triumphant Christian Faith from the dark chambers of Dis. Into a New, Wide-Awake World.

Myschkin, you see, refuses to JUDGE OTHERS. All his crazy antics are just a logical offshoot of that logically primitive decision.

The basic building block of his, and all true ethical behaviour.

And that’s what makes this book Great.

For this is the portrait of an unlikely modern saint - but it is written with a double-edged pen!

It’s ironical - and it’s not.

Sort of reminds you of the Gospel, doesn’t it?

And, somehow, you know - I think that’s what Dostoevsky intended.

When someone asks me about Russian classics they should read, this is the book I recommend. It's not only my favorite work written by Dostoyevsky, but also one of my favorite books of all time.

Further chapter in the story of my books and the conversations they strike up.

There's a scene in The Idiot where the main character, Prince Lev Nikolyevich Myshkin, while traveling on a train to Saint Petersburg, recalls an execution by guillotine he witnessed in France.
Being a very sensitive sort, he empathizes intensely with the victim, imagining that the worst aspect might not be the blade itself but the knowledge, during the days and hours leading up to the beheading, that the victim is facing his final moments. The Prince considers that the last half minute before the blade falls must be the most intensely cruel. He speaks about that experience several times in the novel so it's a significant theme—though the book handles many themes in the course of its baggage-laden journey to the final page.

When I read about the guillotine scene, I was reminded of Vladimir Nabokov's novel, Invitation to a Beheading in which the victim's dilemma is the opposite of the one in Prince Myshkin's account. Nabokov's main character has been sentenced to death by beheading, but he has not been told the date or time of the execution. His torture lies in not knowing what hour will be his last hour—he wants desperately to be told the date and time but no one will oblige him. I wondered if Nabokov's book was a response to Dostoyevsky's—he was not one of D's greatest fans, after all. There was also the fact that Nabokov places a pretend spider in the condemned man's cell. Might that have been a way to ridicule a sentimental detail about a real spider in Prince Myshkin's account of a prison cell? Or maybe I'm searching too hard to link these two books together?

When I finished The Idiot, I went looking for information on Dostoyevsky's life and found that he was sentenced to execution by firing squad for his involvement with a literary group critical of the Tzar (incidentally, the group used to meet in the café on Nevsky Avenue in Saint Petersburg in which Pushkin spent his last hours before the frivolous duel that ended his life).
It seems that Dostoyevsky and his comrades were already blindfolded and standing in front of their graves on Semyonov Place when a message came from the Tzar commuting the sentence to several years hard labor in Siberia instead. The Tzar's decision had been made the previous day but ordered not to be communicated to the prisoners until the last minute. It's clear that Prince Myshkin's theories about the horrors of awaiting execution originated from Dostoyevsky's real experience unlike Nabokov's theories.
But the thing is, one of the men responsible for ordering Dostoyevsky's execution was called Ivan Nabokov. What if he were related to the writer, I thought, so I looked him up. He was! Ivan Nabokov belonged to the same prominent St Petersburg family as Vladimir Nabokov's immediate forebears. It may not mean anything but it is an interesting coincidence.

Ok, I hear you say, enough with the coincidences. But here's another one. In Nabokov's novel, The Gift, there is a chapter ridiculing Nikolay Chernyshevsky, a writer and contemporary of Dostoyevsky who was also subjected to a mock execution because of his revolutionary activities. Nabokov had more than a passing interest in the subject of executions, it seems, and reading The Idiot has given me new ways to think about those two Nabokov novels as if the three books had just had a conversation with each other.
Actually, there's a fourth book involved in the conversation. I started reading a long novel by contemporary Russian author Oleg Strijak a week before I started 'The Idiot'. Strijak's book is a beautiful but complex tribute to Saint Petersburg, to its history, its literature, its canals and its rivers. Half-way through, I decided to pause the reading and choose a nineteenth century novel associated with the city that I haven't yet read. I picked The Idiot. It's a book I've dutifully intended to read for years (ever since I was eighteen and found myself too embarrassed to admit I didn't know who the Idiot of the title was), but we all know about our reading intentions—they often remain just that. What I prefer is when the urge to read something comes, not from any sense of duty, but because another book nudges me to finally get to it. I know then that the time is right, and that was the case with The Idiot. Strijak's angst-ridden idiot of a main character was the perfect preparation for meeting Dostoyevsky's angst-ridden Prince Myshkin who is not an idiot at all. He's now joining my list of favorite literary characters. I think I'll place him beside Leopold Bloom and let them chat to each other. And needless to add, I'm very grateful to Oleg Strijak's book for introducing me to the Prince at last.

Great novel. Beautifully written. Characters were brilliant. The story is about a perfectly, moral good man thrown into a world of corruption. He returns from a sanitarium in Switzerland where he was being treated for epilepsy.

I liked the underlying theme where he talks about unique, ordinary and original people. The different threads of love and the love triangle was excellent to read and see how the madness unfolded.

Prince Myshkin is the main character whose guilelessness and honesty is perceived by his relatives and friends as stupidity and lack of insight. On his return from Switzerland to Saint Petersburg he meets a merchant called Rogozhin who is obsessed with Natasya Flippovna. What follows is a meeting and night with consequences.

The Prince Myshkin has returned to Russia to meet some relatives. What ensues is a story placing a good individual amongst the passions, corruption, greed and conflicts of contemporary Russian society where everyone is obsessed with money. All of it obtained from gambling, inheritance and seemingly without honesty or hard work.

The main character is excellent. He is accepted by a family and he falls in love with Natasya and later one of the daughters of the family Aglaya. Natasya is orphaned as a young girl and was looked after by a relative. Her guardian then rapes her as a young woman and is kept as a mistress. She is used as a commodity and gradually begins to assert control over people. At the centre she is very vulnerable and looking for someone to save her, the Prince.

Aglaya is a cousin who falls in love with him. Both women are in love with him but his idea of love and sex is holding hands and drinking tea. He is surrounded by people who are greedy and not very likeable. The relationships he has with his family and friends is pivotal in the novel in how he sees them. A major problem he has is an inability to make a decision.

It is a story of passion and ultimately an ending which sends the Prince over the edge. A combination of madness, lust and greed. Is the Prince mad, is Natasya and Rogozhin? Or are they a product of their suffering and environment.