The Idiot—Fyodor Dostoevsky’s portrayal of a man based on the image of Christ—posed a significant challenge to its author. How does one paint a truly beautiful soul? This became especially difficult because, as he wrote, “beauty is the ideal, and neither my country, nor civilized Europe, know what that ideal of beauty is.” The result was one of Dostoevsky’s greatest creations—Prince Myshkin, a saintly, yet deeply human character. The story begins when Myshkin arrives on Russian soil after a stay in a Swiss sanatorium. Scorned by St. Petersburg society as an idiot for his generosity and innocence, the prince finds himself at the center of a struggle between a rich, kept woman and a beautiful, virtuous girl, who both hope to win his affection. Unfortunately, Myshkin’s very goodness seems to bring disaster to all he meets, leading to a shocking denouement that tragically reveals how, in a world obsessed with money, power, and sexual conquest, a sanatorium is the only place for a saint. “Dostoevsky had various and distressing personal defects,” wrote Arnold Bennet, “but his humanity and his wisdom, doubtless derived from the man Jesus who delivered the Sermon on the Mount, are unique.” In The Idiot, Dostoevsky pits his delirious insights into the human heart against conventional religion and the machinery of Russian society. Prince Myshkin dramatizes Dostoevsky’s image of “a perfectly beautiful man,” a being who comes as close as humanly possible to the Christian ideal; but for Dostoevsky there was only “one positively beautiful figure in the world—Christ,” and the appearance of Christ had been “an infinite miracle.” There could only be one God-man; and while He remained an eternal aspiration for humanity, such aspiration could never obviously receive its complete fulfillment. —from the Introduction by Joseph Frank Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Princeton University and Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages and Literature at Stanford University, Joseph Frank is the author of a five-volume study of Dostoevsky’s life and work. The first four volumes received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, two Christian Gauss Awards, two James Russell Lowell Awards of the Modern Language Association, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and other honors. Fyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow on October 30, 1821. He won immediate recognition with the 1846 publication of his first novel, Poor Folk. Over the next few years Dostoevsky published several stories, including “The Double” and “White Nights.” His involvement with a group of nihilists led to arrest, solitary confinement, a mock execution, and exile in Siberia. After ten years, he returned to St. Petersburg and literature with a series of unparalleled masterworks: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov.