In many ways this is a book of philosophy disguised as a novel. “The heart is the main thing, the rest is nonsense. Brains are also necessary, of course…. maybe brains are the main thing. Don’t smile, Aglaya, I’m not contradicting myself: a fool with a heart and no brains is as unhappy a fool as a fool with brains but no heart. An old truth. I am a fool with a heart but no brains, and you are a fool with brains but no heart; and we’re both unhappy, and we both suffer.” At the center of the story is a superficially simple-minded man, Prince Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin, the Idiot. “All those flashes and glimpses of a higher self-sense and self-awareness, and therefore of the “highest being,” were nothing but an illness, a violation of the normal state, and if so, then this was not the highest being at all but, on the contrary, should be counted as the very lowest. And yet he finally arrived at an extremely paradoxical conclusion: “So what if it is an illness?” he finally decided. “Who cares that it’s an abnormal strain, if the result itself, if the moment of the sensation, remembered and examined in a healthy state, turns out to be the highest degree of harmony, beauty, gives a hitherto unheard-of and unknown feeling of fullness, measure, reconciliation, and an ecstatic, prayerful merging with the highest synthesis of life?… Those moments were precisely only an extraordinary intensification of self-awareness…. “Yes, for this moment one could give one’s whole life!””
Prince Myshkin has returned to St. Petersburg after years in Switzerland, trying to cure his affliction. “You have suffered and have emerged pure from such a hell, and that is a lot.” What makes this story so much like life is that all the characters are actually quite complicated. “Well, see how you throw a man into a final flummox! For pity’s sake, Prince: first such a simple-heartedness, such innocence as even the golden age never heard of, then suddenly at the same time you pierce a man through like an arrow with this deepest psychology of observation.” There is no one who is easy to root for or wholeheartedly identify with. “Indeed, there is nothing more vexing, for instance, than to be rich, of respectable family, of decent appearance, of rather good education, not stupid, even kind, and at the same time to have no talent, no particularity, no oddity even, not a single idea of own’s own.” Prince Myshkin, upon returning to Russia, goes from knowing not a soul to, in quick succession, becoming acquainted with some distant, well-off relatives, getting pushed into the edges of polite society, and coming into his own sizable inheritance. His life becomes a whirlwind. He also almost immediately falls in love with a mysterious lady of dubious origins, even before he meets her in the flesh. “A man could even lose his faith from that painting!” The story is on the surface a love triangle, or perhaps, more aptly, a love polygon. “It made no difference to this ‘poor knight’ who this lady was or what she might do. It was enough for him that he had chosen her and believed in her ‘pure beauty,’ and only then did he bow down to her forever; and the merit of it is that she might have turned out later to be a thief, but still he had to believe in her and wield the sword for her pure beauty.” It is also a story about Russia, its personality, its people, its religion, and what makes it unique and great. “But I am not saying anything against liberalism. Liberalism is not a sin; it is a necessary part of the whole, which without it would fall apart or atrophy; liberalism has the same right to exist as the most well-mannered conservatism; what I am attacking is Russian liberalism, and I repeat again that I attack it essentially because a Russian liberal is not a Russian liberal, but is a non-Russian liberal. Give me a Russian liberal and I’ll kiss him at once right in front of you.”
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