Customer Reviews

The Idiot (Penguin Classics)

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No point in my laboring here. Having read several translations of this masterpiece, and David Magarshack's effort at least a half dozen times, the Penguin Classics is my favorite. As for the novel, well it simply annihilates the attentive reader. The most wrenching treatment of love, hate, passion to the point of self destruction, this is a terribly funny book in parts, and Magarshack captures the humor beautifully. Torrential conversations, several beautiful women, and the greatest birthday party ever committed to print, there is also a murder(of course, it's Dostoyevsky!). Hallucinogenic passages alternate with passages of great wit, generosity and unbearable truths about being human. This book is a monster and will change your life. My Old and New Testaments, in one volume, at a great price. Get it and believe!!

Prince Myshkin is the person we all want to be, and that at one point we have tried to be, only to be defeated and driven into solitude by the world around us..or driven into mediocracy by joining it.

The Idiot is one of the most fascinating works ever produced, ever discovered. It presents a portrait of the paragon of perfection in human terms, a portrait the reader loves and envies, but one that we invite to the soul of our souls. The reader is inspired to aspire to become the Idiot. It is is a magical pill that, once swallowed, is medicine for our souls. The Idiot and the novel that revolves around him are "inspiration" epitomised.

The honesty, emotion, and innocence of the epileptic "idiot" Prince Myshkin are like a poison which rankles beneath the smooth veneer of respectable nineteenth-century Russian society and eventually erupts in enough scandals and tragedies to fill several weeks of the most turbulent daytime drama series. With ardent love, passionate hatred, obsession, cruelty, revenge, money, marriage, madness, murder, a mistress, a virgin, a secret rendezvous, and a groom left standing at the altar, Dostoevsky provides material worthy of the most melodramatic TV potboiler.

This novel is no candidate for a mid-afternoon soap slot, however. Extended commercial breaks for philosophical broadcasts on topics as diverse as religion, death, patriotism, and nobility require the reader's patience. More importantly, if Dostoevsky's outrageous characters tend to emote like overzealous actors, they do not inhabit a diverting but comfortably remote fantasy world. Instead, they are set against a background of more self-controlled characters who do not lose sight of social standards and accepted everyday behaviors. However, the expectations of society so often contradict the characters' most sincere, passionate, and even generous impulses that the reader is left to wonder which set of characters is more realistically human and which set is doing the acting

What a struggle I had with this. It's a deep and probing work, and you sense in it how Dostoyevsky advanced the art of the novel with an almost psychologically-informed treatment of how people interact with society. It's very long, though, with a wild and woolly plot that tries too hard to be dramatic at every turn, often edging into maudlin melodrama.

The central character, Prince Myshkin, is called "an idiot" by many who know and even like him. He's an epileptic, and prone to saying unguarded things, but there's more to it than that. There is a purity of nature about him, a willingness to risk humiliation rather than compromise a person, even someone he knows in turn may be playing him for a fool. He loves a woman, pities another, and can't decide to which he should dedicate his life. He's a good man, Dostoyevsky tells us again and again, perhaps a spiritual ideal, but presented in a way that's often off-puttingly abstruse and inert.

What makes him tick? I don't know, and neither, perhaps, did Dostoyevsky. At one point, Myshkin offers some self-analysis that only deepens the mystery: "...the prince blamed himself for two extremes: for his extraordinary 'senseless and tiresome' trustfulness and at the same time for his 'contemptible and gloomy' suspiciousness..." Yes to the first part, I could definitely see it, but suspiciousness was something the poor boy could have used more of.

The fact that Myshkin does deal so open-handedly and positively with people is often portrayed as a plus. He encounters characters of varying types, some quite base, who at times merit his good intentions. One, a fellow named Keller, is more or less introduced having slandered Myshkin in print, but after being forgiven, becomes one of Myshkin's truer friends. With a plethora of minor characters, one gets a myriad of reactions to the Prince, which perhaps more than the love triangle at the book's center captures what Dostoyevsky wants to present, the problem of a Christian mindset (though the Prince is not orthodox in either the lower- or upper-case sense) coming to grips with a turgid, materialist world.

The Penguin edition I read, translated by David Magarshack, may have been a problem. Though it's an easy enough read from page to page, eschewing big words, one wonders if some of Dostoyevsky's thematic concerns got oversimplified. Yet as a pure story, the novel's plot lurches in a way that makes clear translation alone is not the issue. In Part 1, he makes his tentative way into society, struggling to present himself correctly to society mavens like Mrs. Yepanchin and her three beautiful daughters, including Aglaya, whom he will come to love. But no sooner is he settled in than he runs off after the minx of the tale, Nastasya Filppovna. We end Part 1 with him chasing her from Petersburg to Moscow and start Part 2 with them already apart; the crux of their relationship taking place off-stage.

Nastasya seems to be the book's most mesmerizing character to many readers; I found her shenanigans to be highly annoying and wondered why, with so many miserable people around him, the Prince feels such a strong pity pull for her. For me, the novel's most wonderful figure is Mrs. Yepanchin, who can't make up her mind about the Prince but likes him very much against her better judgment. To the extent I did come to care for the guy, it was because of her.

Mrs. Yepanchin is also wonderfully comic and vivid, "warm-hearted and impulsive" to a fault as Dostoyevsky describes her. There are some funny moments in the book, at times resembling early Dickens, like with an aged, drunken general who tells tall tales he seems to half-believe even as his knowing family shakes their heads. Episodes like this, and a famous description of Holbein's painting of a dead Christ, offer sparks of engagement, but when the story reverts to the Prince and the two women, a twisted, uneven quality played havoc with my efforts to follow along. "A good Russian cry" is how Mrs. Yepanchin describes it at the end. It's all a lot of soap opera stuff, and with 19th-century Russian manners being what they were, not exactly hot and heavy. You couldn't really write "Peyton Place" in 1867, even if seeming hints of lesbianism and foot fetishes squeak through.

Knowing the problem may rest not with Dostoyevsky but me, and fondly recalling those good bits here and there, I plan to return to this author some day. But not in a hurry.

Dostoevsky's fascinating tale about a man that everyone needs, but nobody admits to needing, is a definite must-read. Based on the orthodox Russian idea: What if Jesus didn't know he was the Messiah until the very end

I agree with all of the other reviewers: read this book. There were three things from this book which stand out for me. The first is that the English transalation of the title is not entirely accurate. Most people, myself included, think of a very stupid person when we think of an idiot. Myshkin is not an idiot in that sense at all. A more accurate sense of the Russian title would be an extremely naive person. Secondly, near the end of the book, at the ball, one of the characters tells Myshkin that Russians have no moderation in their character. "They can't just convert to Catholicism, they have to become Jesuits," they said. I thought immediately of Lenin and the other Bolsheviks who took power only 35 years after this book was written. They illustrated Dostoyevsky's point. Lastly, while there is much action in this novel, I can't remember any other I've read where the main character is not directly involved. Very little happens due to any direct action by him. Most of the novel he is not doing much of anything but talking, while all the other character are scheming, lying, drinking, fornicating, etc. When he does finally take direct action, it turns out to be disastrous for himself and those closest to him. A truly great book and unlike any other.

This was a wonderful read. I thought that this book was a philosophic dialog disguised as a novel, and Dostoyevsky buried his greatest moral insights in this unthinkably convoluted plot. Many of these insights are told by Myshkin though intricate parables and his discourses throughout the story.

Yes! This is clearly the best book ever written by the best author of all time. There's simply no question about it. Dostoevsky was the greatest writer to ever live. Better than Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, and Moliere put together. The Idiot has the philosophical depth of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and the seductive, fast-paced action of Le Carre's Russia House. Is such a thing possible? I didn't think so, but then I read the Idiot. Wow, am I ever glad.

I once read that Dostoevsky was an anti-semite whose beliefs added to the atmosphere that would ultimately result in the Soviet abuses of Jews while Tolstoy wrote important tracts defending Jews. Well, after reading the Idiot, all I can say is that that doesn't matter because Dostoevsky is a far, far, far, far more sensitive writer.

I really think Dostoevsky is just the best. If you don't believe me just check out my other reviews.

I read this book shortly after reading Crime and Punishment (which I loved), and I was sadly let down. I don't know if the translation was bad or if the actual story just didn't interest me. The ideas portrayed were somewhat broad and unfocused and I couldn't ever put my finger on what the whole thing was about. The prose was so bland that even in moments that ought to be intense, seemed just like ordinary everyday happenings. The general idea I got from the book was about a genuinely good person deemed an idiot because pure goodness is not normal in society. I never found myself caring about any particular character except Aglaya and her situation is never resolved at the end.

If you do plan to read this book, I'd try a more modern translation.

Darby