The Idiot

<i>&#147;My intention is to portray a truly beautiful soul.&#148; &#151;Dostoevsky</i><br><br>Despite the harsh circumstances besetting his own life&#151;abject poverty incessant gambling the death of his youngest child&#151;Dostoevsky produced a second masterpiece <i>The Idiot</i> after completing<i> Crime and Punishment.</i> In it a saintly man Prince Myshkin is thrust into the heart of a society more concerned with wealth power and sexual conquest than with the ideals of Christianity. Myshkin soon finds himself at the center of a violent love triangle in which a notorious woman and a beautiful young girl become rivals for his affections.<br><br>Extortion scandal and murder follow testing Myshkin&#146;s moral feelings as Dostoevsky searches through the wreckage left by human misery to find &#147;man in man.&#148; <i>The Idiot </i>is a quintessentially Russian novel one that penetrates the complex psyche of the Russian people. &#147;They call me a psychologist&#148; wrote Dostoevsky. &#147;That is not true. I&#146;m only a realist in the higher sense; that is I portray all the depths of the human soul.&#148;