Book Bearings
The Idiot
- 620 pages · about 10 hours
- First published 1874
- 437 editions
- Free to read
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1 About this book
Prince Lev Myshkin, a gentle, open-hearted young man, returns to Saint Petersburg after years in a Swiss sanatorium and calls on his distant relatives, the family of General Yepanchin. On his way and within his first day he meets the passionate merchant's son Rogozhin and hears of Nastasya Filippovna, a beautiful woman with whom Rogozhin is obsessed. His simplicity and honesty lead the worldly people around him to think him a fool, and his compassion draws him into their conflicts. Dostoevsky, who set out to portray a truly good man, published the novel as a serial in 1868 and 1869.
- Classics
- Notebooks, sketchbooks
- Russia in fiction
- Social conditions
- Social life and customs
- Russia (federation)
- Television adaptations
- Princes
2 What to expect
Dostoevsky's novel about a truly good man, a gentle and guileless prince, set down in a Saint Petersburg society ruled by money, pride and passion. It asks what such goodness can do in the world, and the answer is not a comforting one. The book is long, crowded and uneven, built from intense scenes and long speeches with slower stretches between them, and its mood is tragic.
Good for readers who want: a great Russian novel, goodness tested by the world, and an intense read.
3 Read it free, right here
A free scan from the Internet Archive opens right here on the page, with no sign-up.
Read it on the Internet Archive4 About Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
5 More by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
6 Similar books
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- Amerika by Franz Kafka
- Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
- Short Stories by Anton Chekhov
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- The tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
- In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
- The Dragon Can't Dance by Earl Lovelace