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
Fyodor Dostoevsky the insanity of gambling were there to know". James Joyce praised Dostoevsky's prose: "... he is the man more than any other who has created modern prose, and intensified it to its present-day pitch. It was his explosive power which shattered the Victorian novel with its simpering maidens and ordered commonplaces; books which were without imagination or violence." In her essay "The Russian Point of View", Virginia Woolf said, "Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading". Franz Kafka called Dostoevsky his "blood-relative" and was heavily influenced by his works, particularly "The Brothers Karamazov" and "Crime and Punishment", both