Rating: 
Summary: Personal impact
Review: This may be the most Christian of Dostoyevsky's novels and deals with how to live a good life and the damage this can cause. This refutes the modern and western belief that the Christian "Abundant Life" means riches and lack of trouble. There are many allusions to Revelations, brought out by the relatively minor character Lebedev. There are apocryphal themes of making money, and the nihilism of the younger generation. This book has the potential to personally impact you depending on how you identify with the characters. The Prince, Prince S, and the various generals present different models of the "good life". To respond to an earlier reviewer, the cover painting by Hans Holbein is featured predominately in the book. This book may be work for the reader, (as it was for Dostoyevsky to write) and I referred to list of character often, but the work is rewarding!
Rating:
Summary: The Real Idiot, Stand UP
Review: The Idiot, when I first read it years ago, seemed nothing less than the Christ sacrifice re-enacted, relocated to a spritually corrupt Russian upper class society, representing our contaminated world. Prince Myshkin, (the title in Russia is not 'royal,') immediately suggested Prince of Peace, the Saviour.
Years later when I reread the book, that interpretation was also true, but insufficent to the dense story. This time around, the Idiot, was funnier, less seriously driven by a divinely sparked moral perfection. Holiness takes a lampooning, along with the canon of social superiority, and those that would be servitors of justice. (Hadn't FD afterall, been imprisoned by their likes?) The Idiot, it suddenly leaped out to me, is none other than the author, condemned like Myshkin by a malfunctioning switch in the brain. Epilepsy in a severely religious world, was imbued with the evil/spirit blame factor, and implied weakness as well. Moreover, Dostoevski, carried what he undoubtedly felt as a moral failure within himself, a compulsive gambler lives in chronic, progressive despair. Hadn't he, as Myshkin, committed himself to a way of righteousness, only to fail to resolve or improve the sufferings of his fellows? How often, would you imagine, he, like other addicts willed to quit, and could not stop? The moral choice to be compassionate, in an almost Buddhist sense, is correct, but will not be repaid in any betterment to the giver or the receiver. Prince Myshkin was good, compulsively so. He was also a buffoon, exploited by immoral others, and condemned by an impaired mind. Righteousness, is insufficent for liberating our lower order, deficient bodies. Funny? Yes, the matriarch, of a pre-feminist culture, is the comic relief of an otherwise heavy and often inscrutable, long novel. The pecadillos of the 'respectable' gentlemen, immobilized by greed and sexual desire, the various flopped attempts at love, and friendship, serve comic purpose. There are many, many gambles, and a non-stop game of roulette/life. The only other gambler aka Idiot, is of course, God. Dostoyevski's intense relgious ambivalence and inevitable return to faith is also a crap shoot- maybe the greatest of all. Is there, or isn't there, take a chance. God bet on the world, then sent his son to redeem us, was that a win? God bet the jack of hearts, was it an ace that took the pot?
In Karamazov, the holiest man, in death, left an unbearable stench, the last scene in the Idiot, also involves a similar image. Are we again, confronting holiness in the sense of foul?
The Idiot, is one of the finest novels in history, many would say the finest. It is incomplete and uncertain, as any human creation must be.
Rating: 
Summary: Definitely Russian--Definitely worthwhile
Review: It took me three months to read "The Idiot" by Fyodor Dostoevsky, but more than five years to get around to reading it after it was suggested to me by my friend's mother in Zagreb. She told me that she loved Russian literature and when I asked which novel I should read if I only ever read one, she said, without a doubt, "The Idiot." It was her favorite by far. My overwhelming impression after finishing it (just minutes ago) is that I feel that I missed a great deal. A Russian friend of mine told me that it is difficult to start Russian literature with "The Idiot" because there is a great deal of contextual understanding required for it. This version, translated by Alan Myers and published by Oxford World's Classics in 1992, was quite readable and included explanatory notes on the text at the end, which helped to illustrate some of the incidents to which Dostoevsky refers, including literary references and a famous and gory murder by a person on which a main character in the novel was modeled. (I had to pick it up and put it down a lot, which I'm sure detracted from the pace of the plot for me. It would be more enjoyed if one had a great deal of time to focus on it until it was finished, though I did enjoy it a great deal.) I am told "The Idiot" is very characterisic of a Russian novel, long, with many characters. It also is overcast with existentialism and hopelessness. I will try to summarize the plot of what is really a very psychological novel. (The big moments are emotional, mostly, and one spends a lot of time thinking about what makes various characters, particularly the rival women, do what they do and say what they say.) Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin is the title character, or the idiot. He has an epilepsy-type disorder, which has caused him to be hospitalized and treated in Switzerland for some years. Returning to St. Petersburg on the train, he is in a car with Parfion Semyonovich Rogozhin and Lukyan Timofeyevich Lebedev, which is where he learns of the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova, a kept woman whose beauty is infamous. In order to secure an inheritance, the Prince goes to General Ivan Fedorovich Yepanchin, where he meets Gavrila Ardalionovich Ivolgin, his secretary and the general's daughter, Aglaya Ivanovna Yepanchin, another famous, but chaste and pure (but kind of high maintenance) beauty. The first part of the book is incredibly suspenseful, taking place within perhaps 24 hours or so (I can't quite remember), but I found the rest of the book a little more meandering, though not irritatingly so. There are exciting incidents and a surprising ending, though it was foreshadowed pretty well throughout; I should have seen it or something like it coming. The Prince is clearly meant to be a Christ-like figure. My version of the paperback has a detail of Christ's face from Christ in the Tomb by Hans Holbein on the cover. The Prince is always kind and good, he loves without the strictures of the upper-middle-class society that he sees about him, and even when he's made fun of, tricked, attacked and maligned, he continues to love and care for the social group in which he has found himself. The introductory notes state, "Yet if Myshkin is a Christ he is a flawed one, and his mission is doomed to failure. His Christian meekness and compassion ... have disruptive ... consequences when practised in the 'real' world of nineteenth-century Russia. ...
[I]n Russia the same qualities [innocence and simplicity] breed mistrust, embarassment, and hatred. ... In Russia Myshkin discovers, for the first time in his life, the gulf between ideals and reality and the impossibility of achieving paradise on earth." Recently, I read a book called "If You Want to Write" by Brenda Euland, published in the 1930s. She praised the Russian writers because she said they imagined their worlds and characters so clearly and completely that they merely had to write down what they saw and describe it. Their texts did not seem made up, or stilted. I would agree with her. From the first sentence of The Idiot, I could clearly see the world in which Prince Myshkin lived. I also did try to prepare for Dostoevsky himself by reading J.M. Coetzee's fictional work about the return of Dostoevsky to St. Petersburg from Germany when his teen-age stepson died, The Master of Petersburg. I think it was a good preparation for the dark, existential pain of this novel.
Rating:
Summary: A Classic with Great Personal Relevance to Me
Review: It's strange. I've always felt as if the title of this book was trying to say something to me. Speak, almost...as if it had some great insight into my incredibly complex personality to offer. Yet despite my extensive postdoctoral work on the book, the answer eludes me yet! This proves without a doubt the eternal mystery of this great Russian author.
Rating:
Summary: Divinely Inspired?
Review: It is said that if you take a zillion monkeys and set each of them clacking away at a typewriter then eventually one of them will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. Well to produce such a book as "The Idiot," you would need to employ in place of the monkeys, a similar number of brilliant authors - genuises no less - and maybe, just maybe a book as excellent as Dostoyevsky's "The Idiot" might be produced. If some of the duller parts of the Bible are supposed to have been written under the guidance of divine inspiration, what then are we to suppose of a work like this that glows with spiritual power?
Rating:
Summary: excellent portrayal of human nature
Review: i was a bit reluctant to begin this novel after the reading of "the brothers karamazov" and "crime and punishment" because these last two i found colossal and was afraid to be dissapointed. The idiot turned out to be dostoievsky in his pure form, insightful, witty and exquisite in depicting the moral of every character. You can easily sense the true maturity of this man, his own vision of society, religion, and politics, and is difficult not to find out the strong resemblances between prince myshkin and him. A true russian novel.
Rating: 
Summary: A Reader's Dilemma
Review: My comments and review are here based solely on the translation work of Constance Garnett, not the actual text behind it. I found this translation so stilted as to be almost unreadable. This problem was greatest in the short utterances of some of the charcters. They would respond to what the main character of that portion was saying, but I generally had no sense of what those responses meant. My guess is that Ms. Garnett, in her attempt to stay faithful to the Russian, stayed away from using English idiom, but this sadly resulted in severe loss of clarity. I would recommend that potential readers look for a more modern translation.
Rating: 
Summary: not my favourite: sometimes a bit boring
Review: I really like Dostoyevsky, but I consider 'The Idiot' a novel that sometimes gets too boring. It is magnificent the way Dostoyevsky portraits the Russian situation at the time, and Mishkin is really an interesting character, similar to my mind to Aliosha Karamazov. However, the book is, I think, unnecessarily enlarged, and gets stmes a bit dense and even boring. Maybe the next time i will like it best. Now I prefer 'Crime & Punishment' or 'The Brothers Karamazov', actually.
Rating:
Summary: Don't trust Society!
Review: I always write my thoughts on the literature after it comes to its conclusion. It is a worthwhile practice and it may, perhaps, benefit you. For the Idiot: Nice guys do indeed finish last! (As one reviewer has already contributed) Again, suffering in apparent in this Dostoevsky novel. Prince Myshkin suffers by actually having qualities which we think would be blessings - actual intelligence and honest kindness. Myshkin starts our story as an "idiot," and he makes the journey to Russia (or Society with all it's evils and negatives - ego's that are impossible for one to actually be satisfied with, unrequited love, pride, greed, etc.,). And the story ends with Myshkin dying in the same Society of people, yet geographically he's in Europe. Nevertheless, he starts as an "idiot" and ends as an "idiot." He is Christ-like in that 1.)he is the sacrafice for acquantinces like Mrs. Epanchin, so that they may see the negatives of their Society 2.) He dies young as Christ did. Christ came to Earth to save but then he went to Heaven---Myshkin came to save a certain Russian society but he did his "leaving" elsewhere (Europe). This is a wonderful read and I know I'm not the best reviewer, but sharing comments on books is productive, as is reading them - flipping the T.V. remote is not. Carpe Diem.
Rating:
Summary: RUSSIAN BOOKS: UNREADABLE?
Review: Most of us have probably heard the phrase, "Why, that was as unreadable as a Russian novel!" Of course, they're probably thinking about Tolstoy's War and Peace. The fact of the matter is this: I was 18 or 19, in AP English, VERY skeptical about these so-called "classics". But then we read Notes from Underground and my view of Russian literature was permanently changed. As a matter of fact, I liked NfU SO much that I read THE IDIOT of my own initiative and--get this--liked it MORE than NfU. Hey, how can you resist a story about a diseased Prince who's coming home to Russia after being in an Asylum? There were just so many quotable and likable passages in this book. My bookmark soon became full with page numbers. Towards the beginning, the Prince and a servant have an interesting conversation concerning one of Dostoyevsky's main interests: Crime and Punishment. That particular scene details a French execution. Quite a while later, Dostoyevsky retells that French execution story and DOES IT BETTER THAN THE FIRST TIME. But the book is not always serious. One of the things that I like about Dostoyevsky is that he has a dark sense of humor. You would too, if you were in debt, epileptic, and were spared from the firing squad AT THE LAST SECOND. I laughed out loud when I got to the part about the Cigar and Poodle. You'll find it in Chapter 9 or so. Also, there's a character named Prince S. Now THAT is a pun. Of course, being a tranlated work, who's to say whether it was intentional or not? Yes, this is a very long book, but I REALLY enjoyed it. Hopefully you'll come to agree.
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