Petersburg, returning to Russia after several years under a doctor’s care in Switzerland. We first meet this simple-hearted young man on a train to St. Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin is the “idiot” named in the title. Once you read it, you will not forget it. Though it may come as a surprise to those of us who grew up watching a copy of the novel collecting dust in a reverential spot on our parents’ bookshelf, looking so serious and sophisticated that we could hardly imagine trying to read it, it happens to be a vastly entertaining novel. It’s a great novel in which a sensitive reader can feel himself totally immersed, only to be shocked out of “willing suspension of disbelief” when its author breaks the fourth wall and begins commenting on his characters as fictional creations.

Tragic to a truly disturbing degree, it is too subtle and complex to make grand opera, too often given to immensely long talky scenes, featuring too many characters, to translate well into film-though the attempt has often been made to adapt it for stage or screen. Dickensian in its large cast of vividly colorful characters and satire on the society of its time, it is not quite a picaresque. Its climax is mysterious and chilling, but it is not a thriller.

It made me laugh a great deal, but it is not a comedy. Published in a series of magazine issues in 1868-69, this is one of the masterpieces by the author of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.

The prince dostoevsky