I was just told, dear brother, that to-day or to-morrow we are to be sent off. I asked to see you. But I was told that this was impossible. (...) Brother ! I have not become downhearted or low-spirited. Life is everywhere life, life in ourselves, not in what is outside us. They will lacerate me, it is true ! But there remains in me my heart and the same flesh and blood which can also love, and suffer, and desire, and remember, and this, after all, is life. On voit le soleil ! Now, good-bye, brother ! Don't grieve for me!
This is one of the letters that Dostoevsky wrote to his brother before his death sentence. The execution is called off and revealed as psychological torture. Why is this important you ask? After this torture, he became deeply religious and became obsesed with Jesus Christ. Also he was epileptic, and wrote in his letters that just before epileptic seziers he would expierence ''feelings of universal peace and divine love''.
Fast forward 20 years later, he wrote Idiot, and said it was his most personal novel.
First, critics obsess about the idea that Myshkin is Jesus, second Myshkin is also an epileptic, and third, through the whole novel you will see stories about how people react to the knowledge they are going to die.
Definition of idiot
1 : dated, now offensive : a person affected with extreme mental retardation
2 : a foolish or stupid person
Now the title has both of these meanings, but it's irony. It's interesting that the first idea was to name the novel ''Myshkin'' but then he decided to name it Idiot. Why did he want us to focus on the way others perceive Myshkin? That is a question I would like for you to remember while reading the novel.
What will hopefully happen while you progress trough the book is that you will begin to examine some of your views, especially what is considered to be ''good'' today. A glimpse of how the system of values in today's world has been thoroughly distorted has already become a common thing, but in front of a purity as embodied in the image of Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, even those ideal values that have disappeared can be called into question. He defends his principles and ideals with his whole being, even at the price of being called by an idiot.
