The Idiot
Questions
The most common questions about The Idiot, answered from the book.
- What is Dostoevsky's The Idiot about?The Idiot is about a good and guileless prince, Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, who returns from Switzerland to St. Petersburg and, in a world where...
- What is the summary of The Idiot?The Idiot tells how Prince Myshkin, a good and sick man who returns from a Swiss sanatorium to St. Petersburg, passes through the lives of two women...
- Is Dostoevsky's The Idiot a good book?Yes: The Idiot is one of Dostoevsky's great novels and is often read as the most personal of them, but it is a long book with an uneven pace, which...
- How many pages does The Idiot have?The Idiot has about 890 pages in an ordinary edition, divided into four parts and 50 chapters. The number varies from one edition to another,...
- Which is the heaviest book by Dostoevsky?In length, the heaviest of the four great novels is The Brothers Karamazov, with about 296,000 words in the Russian original; The Idiot and The...
- Who is Prince Myshkin in The Idiot?Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin is the protagonist of The Idiot: the last of an old, decayed princely family, an orphan, raised in the countryside by...
- Why is the book called The Idiot?Because idiot is the word everyone uses for Myshkin, the word he uses for his own past, and the word that closes the book: the title is the name of a...
- Who is Nastasya Filippovna in The Idiot?Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova is the woman everyone fights over in The Idiot: an orphan of twenty-five, raised and later supported by the wealthy...
- Who is Rogozhin in The Idiot?Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin is the merchant who, in The Idiot, inherits two and a half million from his father and pursues Nastasya Filippovna until...
- Who is Aglaya Epanchina in The Idiot?Aglaya Ivanovna Epanchina is General Epanchin's youngest daughter, the beauty of the house, twenty years old: proud, ironic, averse to haggling. She...
- What is Holbein's painting in The Idiot?It is The Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521-1522), by Hans Holbein the Younger, which Dostoevsky saw in the museum in Basel and which appears in The...
- What does "beauty will save the world" mean in The Idiot?In the novel the phrase is "the world will be saved by beauty" (mir spasyot krasota), and the form that became a saying, "beauty will save the...
- Who is Hippolyte in The Idiot?Hippolyte Terentyev is the young consumptive of The Idiot, seventeen or eighteen years old, with only a few weeks to live, who reads to the prince's...
- How does The Idiot end?The Idiot ends with Nastasya's death, Rogozhin's sentence, and the prince's return to the Swiss sanatorium, where he no longer recognizes anyone.On...
- Is Myshkin inspired by Don Quixote and Christ?In part, yes. Dostoevsky himself said, in a letter to his niece, that the idea of The Idiot was to portray a positively beautiful man, and that among...
- Does Myshkin have epilepsy in The Idiot?Yes: the prince has a nervous illness that the narrator calls epilepsy (in Russian, paduchaya, from "to fall"), and which Myshkin himself describes...
- Does Myshkin love Nastasya or Aglaya?The book does not decide, and the text gives reasons for both sides. Myshkin says he loves both of them, with different loves: Nastasya with pity,...
- What is the main theme of The Idiot?The main theme of The Idiot is what unscheming goodness can achieve in a world where everything has a price, and what compassion costs the one who...
- Where and when does The Idiot take place?The Idiot takes place in Russia, between St. Petersburg and Pavlovsk, a summer resort nearby, from late November to early July of the following year....