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) is generally included in modern editions as an appendix. It has also been published separately, translated from Russian to English by S. S. Koteliansky and Virginia Woolf, with an essay on Dostoevsky by Sigmund Freud. Dostoevsky wrote to Maykov that the chief theme of his novel was "the very one over which, consciously and unconsciously, I have been tormented all my life: it is the existence of God." Much of the plot develops out of the tension between belief and non-belief, and the words and actions of most of the characters seem to be intimately bound to the position they