The idiot is perhaps Dostoevsky’s most personal novel as it draws deeply on his own experiences and his deepest convictions. While prince Myshkin is far from a self-portrait of him he is in some ways a sort of idealized self-projection. He is afflicted with epilepsy, the same disease that so marred Dostoevsky’s life and made his work on the idiot a nightmare. In the novel he embodies the same Christian conviction, love of children and faith in humility and compassion that were the corner stones of the writers own philosophical stance. He describes in great detail the feelings of a man condemned to execution in terms which recall Dostoevsky’s own experiences in 1849 when, convicted of a plot against the Tsar, he too faced the firing squad for several agonising minutes before his sentence was commuted to hard labour and Siberian exile. The prince is also drawn into a nerve racking relationship with a proud and sensual woman, Nastasya Filippovna, which has much in common with Dostoevsky’s own painful experience with Polina Suslova with whom he had travelled with in Europe and drove him to extremes of passionate jealousy comparable to those of rogozhin in the novel. Other biographical influences are Myshkins fascination with calligraphy as Dostoevsky’s own notes are filled with extravagant gothic script. Myshkins return to a strange and unfamiliar Russia mirrors Dostoevsky’s own return from Siberian exile in 1859.

The Idiot was written in a time of great stress and hardship for the writer as he travelled across Europe and tried to stay above financial ruin. He in fact expressed in a number of letters his fear that the novel would be a failure and he was only being pushed to complete the novel by his obligations to his publisher to release a new book. He mentioned in a letter to his niece “if only you knew how hard it is to be a writer, and to carry such a burden. I know for certain that if I had two or three stable years for this novel I would write a work they would talk about for a hundred years!” yet it is clear that during his work on the novel he had no such peace of mind and in fact financial pressures forced him to publish the first part of the novel at a time when he had no idea of how to continue it.

The novel is about the failure of the positively good man in a society beset by the evils of materialism, egoism and dominated by the ethics of self-interest and personal wealth. Prince Myshkin is introduced as a character untouched by these failings and driven by a conviction that ‘meekness is a mighty force’ and that compassion is the most important and perhaps the sole law of human existence. Dostoevsky’s distaste of western capitalism is shown in the part played by money in the novel. The arrival of the distraught prince Myshkin provokes amused contempt in Russian society until he suddenly inherits a fortune from which point be becomes regarded as a man of substance. Money is the primary detachment of social worth in the novel as the character at the top of the social pile are those skilled in investment, the business man Totsky, the financier General Ivolgin and the money lender Ptitsyn. In the society depicted in the novel all are mesmerized by money and one of the most striking features in the novel is the way all characters seem to introduce themselves with a remark about money. In the opening scene on the train Rogozhin speaks of his recent inheritance and quizzes the prince about the cost of his medical treatment in Switzerland. When the prince is lodged in the Ivolgin household he is warned not to lend money to the General, the other lodger Ferdischenko peers around the Princes door to ask for a loan. Berdovsky and his henchmen try to deceive the Prince out of his inheritance and the rivalry between Ganya and Rogozhin for the hand of Nastasya Filippovna accumulates in an auction were both try to outbid the other, Rogozhina winning bid is wrapped in a copy of the stock exchange gazette.

Through the novel the Princes Christian ideals are tested. The Prince is almost from another world as his illness has kept him apart from society and has spent the formative years of his life not amidst the pressures of contemporary life but in the sterile environment of a swiss clinic. His ideals remain bright and intact as they have never being challenged by experience. The Prince is portrayed as an almost Christ lie figure who preaches meekness and compassion. Yet he is a flawed one at that and his mission is doomed to failure. His ideals which translated so effectively into achievements in Switzerland have disruptive and ultimately lethal consequences when tested in the real world. In Switzerland his honesty and truthfulness that wins him friendships in Switzerland only serve offend those he encounters in Russia. The compassion that served to resurrect Marie in Switzerland provokes the insane jealousy of Rogozhin and leads to the death of another woman, Nastasya Filippovna. In Russia the Prince discovers for the first time the gulf between ideals and reality and the impossibility of achieving paradise on earth, his epilepsy becomes a metaphor for this discovery. At the end of the novel the Prince who arrived at the start of it and was hopeful of his recovery and eager to please those around him ends with him gibbering unintelligibly alongside the body of Nastasya Filippovna alongside her murderer, all are destroyed by the passions of the ‘positively good man’.

The destruction of the positively good man through his increasing intimacy and with such symbolically charged characters make The Idiot so much more then another social novel of the 19th century. The trappings of this realistic novel in which the authors deepest beliefs are explored and his artistic sense and psychological insight ensure that The Idiot succeeds as a novel. He was right to anticipate the moral failure of his character but wrong to fear the artistic failure of his work which has lasted for well over a hundred years and will continue to captivate its readers for centuries to come.

i'll start it off so by my own analysis of the booki invite so anyone else to share there thoughts on the book and on what there perception of it was