Prince Myshkin Prince Myshkin Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin (pre-reform Russian: ; post-reform ) is the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel "The Idiot". Dostoevsky wanted to create a character that was "entirely positive... with an absolutely beautiful nature", someone who is truly 'Christian'. According to Joseph Frank, the character of Prince Myshkin approaches "the extremest incarnation of the Christian ideal of love that humanity can reach in its present form, but he is torn apart by the conflict between the contradictory imperatives of his apocalyptic aspirations and his earthly limitations." Prince Myshkin has been in Switzerland for the last four years, at a
What Is to Be Done? (novel) work for the revolution, and ruthlessly subordinate everything in their lives to the cause, the work furnished a blueprint for the asceticism and dedication unto death which became an ideal of the early socialist underground of the Russian Empire. The book is perhaps better known in the English-speaking world for the responses it created than as a novel in its own right. Fyodor Dostoevsky mocked the utilitarianism and utopianism of the novel in his 1864 novella "Notes from Underground", as well as in his 1872 novel "Demons". Leo Tolstoy wrote a different "What Is To Be Done?", published in 1886,