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...passed several minutes in the full conviction that he was about to die, and in his novels characters repeatedly imagine the state of mind of a man approaching execution. The hero of The Idiot, Prince Myshkin, offers several extended descriptions of this sort, which readers knew carried special authority because the author of the novel had gone through the terrible...
in Dostoyevsky, Fyodor: The Idiot )Dostoyevsky’s next major novel, Idiot (1868–69; The Idiot), represents his attempt to describe a perfectly good man in a way that is still psychologically convincing—seemingly an impossible artistic task. If he could succeed, Dostoyevsky believed, he would show that Christ-like goodness is indeed possible; and so the very writing of the work became an...
...Besy (1872; The Possessed), a novel based on Russian terrorism, is famous as the work that most accurately predicted 20th-century totalitarianism. In Idiot (1868–69; The Idiot) and Bratya Karamazovy (1879–80; The Brothers Karamazov), Dostoyevsky, who is generally regarded as one of the supreme psychologists in world literature, sought to...
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