"The Idiot," along with "The Possessed" and "The Brothers Karamazov," remains one of Dostoevsky's dominant works. Prince Myshkin, an epileptic, returns from a Swiss clinic where a doctor had cared for him out of compassion. He is an orphan. His entire fortune consists of a small bundle of clothes. He knows nothing about life. "I am absolutely certain," the doctor tells him, "that you are a child, that is, entirely a child. Only in stature and face do you resemble a man, but in development, in soul, in character, perhaps even in mind, you have not matured and will remain so even if you live to be sixty years old."
This twenty-six-year-old child is kind, without servility, timid, good, and simple. He has not lived. Or, at least, he has not lived "in action." His life has passed in internal contemplations. He has fortified himself outside the social walls, outside the world of "two and two make four." And when he falls among this world, in this city inhabited by predators, swindlers, sensualists, clowns, and drunkards, he seems like an intruder.