Prince Myshkin

Prince Myshkin, formally Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, is the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot, published in installments between 1868 and 1869. Returning to Russia after years in a Swiss sanatorium being treated for epilepsy, Myshkin is a gentle, guileless and deeply compassionate man whose total honesty and lack of social cunning strike the sophisticated, status-conscious St. Petersburg society around him as simple-mindedness, giving the novel its title. Myshkin becomes entangled with two women, the proud, self-destructive Nastasya Filippovna and the more conventionally eligible Aglaya Yepanchin, and his attempts to help both women out of genuine kindness, without regard for his own reputation or advantage, repeatedly collide with the manipulation, jealousy and violence of those around him. Dostoevsky explicitly conceived Myshkin as an attempt to portray a wholly good and Christ-like man placed within a corrupt, morally compromised society, and the character's eventual mental collapse under the weight of events he cannot control is often read as a statement about the fate of pure goodness in a cynical world. Prince Myshkin remains one of the most discussed character studies in Russian literature.