Beauty Will Save the World

I found what I was looking for and purchased a paperback copy of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. The Idiot was published in 1868 and was Dostoevsky’s attempt to create a perfect soul in the character of Prince Myshkin, a young man so immune to the conniving aspirations of Russian high society that he is called an idiot forty-five times throughout the novel. But Prince Myshkin is not an idiot; he is simply a man motivated by altruistic love instead of class-conscious ambition.

In the novel, people call Myshkin an idiot while talking about him among other members of the snobbish St. Petersburg…