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 a benefactor and treated in Switzerland for a nervous illness similar to epilepsy, who returns to Russia without money, without a post, and without guile.
He arrives in Petersburg one morning at the end of November, after more than four years at Doctor Schneider's sanatorium, wearing a Swiss cape unsuited to winter and carrying a small bundle, and on the same day he receives news of an inheritance of a million and a half. The trait that defines him is reading faces and saying what he reads, without calculation: before the portrait of Nastasya Filippovna, he says, "Ah, if only she were good! Everything would be saved!"
He is called an idiot in every house he enters, and he himself uses the word for his own past: "But what an idiot I am now, if I myself understand that they take me for an idiot?" Rogozhin calls him a holy fool; Aglaya, the most honest and truthful man of them all; Radomsky, someone who never loved either of the two women. The book ends with him back in the sanatorium, recognizing no one.
His meaning is debated. Some read him as a positively beautiful man whom the author wanted to test in a world that does not receive him, and others as someone so good out of an inability to be cruel that he becomes harmless and unable to stop the evil around him. The text provides material for both readings.