The Idiot The Idiot The Idiot (pre-reform Russian: ; post-reform ) is a novel by the 19th-century Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky. It was first published serially in the journal "The Russian Messenger" in 1868–9. The title is an ironic reference to the central character of the novel, Prince (Knyaz) Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, a young man whose goodness, open-hearted simplicity and guilelessness lead many of the more worldly characters he encounters to mistakenly assume that he lacks intelligence and insight. In the character of Prince Myshkin, Dostoevsky set himself the task of depicting "the positively good and beautiful man." The novel examines the
Demons (Dostoevsky novel) take up within this struggle. Dostoevsky saw atheism as the root cause of Russia's deepening social problems. He further wrote to Maykov: "a man who loses his people and his national roots also loses the faith of his fathers and his God." It is in this letter that he speaks, referring primarily to Stavrogin and secondarily to Stepan Verkhovensky, of the 'Russian Man' as comparable to the man possessed by demons who is healed by Jesus in the parable of the swine. In "Demons" the Russian man has lost his true national identity (inextricably linked, for Dostoevsky, with the Orthodox