Which Dostoevsky novel has Prince Myshkin as its central character?

Prince Myshkin is the central character of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot.

The Idiot was published in serial form between 1868 and 1869. Its protagonist, Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, returns to Russia after treatment for epilepsy in Switzerland. He is compassionate, candid, and unusually trusting, qualities that clash with the vanity, greed, jealousy, and social calculation around him.

Dostoevsky designed Myshkin as a figure of almost complete goodness, but the novel does not present goodness as a simple solution. Myshkin’s innocence exposes the motives of other characters, including Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova and Parfyon Rogozhin. Their relationships produce a tragic plot involving love, possession, humiliation, and violence.

The title is deliberately ironic and socially specific. People call Myshkin an idiot because they see his openness and lack of worldly cunning as foolishness. The novel’s famous central figure is therefore not unintelligent; the word reflects society’s judgment of a person who refuses its usual strategies.