Just Finished Reading Dostoevsky's The Idiot

Fyodor Dostoevsky, already my favorite Russian author, can add another book to the list of my favorites with his novel The Idiot, which came out in 1869.  The "idiot" in the title is a Russian prince, a young man named Lev Nikolayevitch Myshkin, more commonly known as Myshkin, or the Prince.  He is far from being the idiot that others portray him as...his affliction is epilepsy, and in the story's opening passage he is returning to Russia from a Swiss clinic in which he has spent much of his youth under treatment.  His aim, which he eventually succeeds at, is to look up some distant relations in order to get help adjusting to living independently. On the railway trip there, he meets up with and befriends Rogozhin, a sinister character obsessed with a woman named Nastassya Filippovna.  Myshkin himself in time becomes enamored with her, but explains his affections as being of pity.  These two characters, Rogozhin and Nastassya Filippovana, keep resurfacing throughout the book.  As the story develops, it becomes clear  that the Prince, always willing to forgive and put others in the best possible light, displays in his behavior a kind of naivete that predisposes others to manipulate him instead of respecting his good intentions toward them.  At the beginning of The Idiot, I was certain that the term was an abject, unfair misnomer, as Myshkin is quite intelligent and lucid with his deeply held thoughts.   But as the story progressed, and especially toward the end, I began to have second thoughts about this.  It is one thing to have an abstract intellectual intelligence, as well as being smart enough to be able to clearly communicate to others one's thoughts.  But there is something called "social intelligence" as well that allows one to learn, through experience, how to deal effectively in the context of social relationships. In this, Prince Myshkin is sorely deficient, and his incapacity to adapt to his social situation puts him in one ridiculous, if not dangerous, circumstance after another.  Not one to give away the book's ending, I'll just say that, after having the reader teetering on the edge of despair about poor Myshkin, Dostoevsky works a little miracle of justice and mercy on this sympathetic character.

In any good work of fiction, the author puts a lot of himself or herself into the story...and also elicits a sense of empathy from the readers, a recognition within themselves of truths that are being expressed.  The Idiot, I believe, is a masterpiece at fulfilling both of these conditions.  In Myshkin's perplexity about the confounding behavior of his circle of friends and acquaintances toward him, I am totally in sympathy, as I have endured this sort of thing to various degrees for a lifetime.  But unlike with Myshkin, I feel that, at least to a modest degree, I have learned a little from my experiences...