Prince Myshkin Earth, which was created perhaps solely for the emergence of that Being." Myshkin remains silent in response to Ippolit's sarcastic barbs about Christian humility, and does not make any attempt to refute his convoluted atheistic arguments. When engaging only with each other, the Prince's quietism and sincere empathy occasionally elicit a corresponding consciousness in Ippolit, but he always later reverts back to his cynical bitterness. 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",
Demons (Dostoevsky novel) fear. But Stavrogin himself does not even believe in his own atheism, and as Shatov and Tikhon recognize, drives himself further into evil out of a desire to torture himself and avoid the truth. Kirillov sums up Stavrogin's dilemma thus: "If Stavrogin believes, then he doesn't believe that he believes. But if he doesn't believe, then he doesn't believe that he doesn't believe." Dostoevsky saw Russia's growing suicide rate as a symptom of the decline of religious faith and the concomitant disintegration of social institutions like the family. Self-destruction as an end result of atheism or loss of faith is