A Novel Written Outside Russia
The Idiot was written abroad, by an author fleeing from creditors. According to Joseph Frank's biography, the couple left Russia in April 1867, when the creditors had already opened a case that could send Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky to debtors' prison, on a trip planned for three months that lasted four years. When he began looking for his next novel, he already owed four thousand rubles to Katkov, editor of the Russian Messenger, and was asking Apollon Maykov for personal loans. During the composition, the couple changed residence five times, passing through Geneva, Vevey, Milan and Florence, and the first seven chapters came out in the Russian Messenger in January 1868. The novel was serialized in 1868 and 1869.
The Idea: A Positively Beautiful Man
Frank relates that on 4 December Dostoevsky discarded a first complete draft and spent two weeks making six plans a day, until he fixed the central idea in a letter to his niece Sofia Ivanova.
In the letter, he sums up the idea as portraying a positively beautiful man, admits that he threw himself into the novel the way one bets at roulette, hoping the idea would mature while he wrote, and reproaches himself for it.
Among the literary precedents he cites for this figure are Don Quixote and Mr. Pickwick, who work because they are ridiculous, and the risk he was taking was to write a good man without that comic shield. Frank calls The Idiot the most personal of Dostoevsky's novels, the only one in which he narrates from within the main character the experience of the mock firing squad.
The Death of Sofia
In Geneva the couple's first daughter, Sofia, was born and died. Frank gives the dates: she was born on 5 March 1868, was baptized on 4 May, and died of pulmonary inflammation on 12 May, under three months old, after catching a chill on a walk recommended by the doctor himself.
In a letter written after his daughter's death, Dostoevsky says that that being of three months was already a person to him, refuses the consolation that he will have other children, and asks where the child is for whose sake he would have accepted being crucified.
The Holbein in Basel
Settled in Geneva, the two visited the museum in Basel, and Anna Grigoryevna recorded the impact of a painting by Hans Holbein, The Dead Christ (1521-1522), the same one that reappears in Rogozhin's room (Part Two, ch. IV).
here the whole physique [of Christ] is emaciated, the ribs and bones are showing, the hands and feet riddled with sores, all bluish and swollen, like a decomposing corpse.
The 1849 Firing Squad and Epilepsy
The condemned man whom Myshkin describes at the Epanchins' lunch (Part One, ch. V) has a model in the author. On 22 December 1849, in Semyonovsky Square, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky put on the burial shroud with the other condemned men of the Petrashevsky circle, and the tsar's pardon was announced only after the first three were already tied to the posts. The epilepsy that Myshkin carries also belongs to the author: on the return from his 1857 marriage, he had a fit that the doctor diagnosed as epilepsy.