The Idiot (Om Books) – Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Idiot (Om Books) – Fyodor Dostoevsky (Bestseller)|Dostoevsky set out in?The Idiot?to portray a man of pure innocence. The twenty-six-year-old Prince Myshkin, following a stay of several years in a Swiss sanatorium, returns to Russia to collect an inheritance and ?be among people.? Even before he reaches home he meets the dark Rogozhin, a rich merchant?s son whose obsession with the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna eventually draws all three of them into a tragic denouement. In Petersburg the prince finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with money, power, and manipulation. Scandal escalates to murder as Dostoevsky traces the surprising effect of this ?positively beautiful man? on the people around him, leading to a final scene that is one of the most powerful in all of world literature.