El idiota

Written after Crime and Punishment and before The Demons, again in a long period of hardship, The Idiot (1868-1869) begins the final cycle of Dostoevsky's masterpieces. Like all of them, it has led to multiple readings: Hermann Hesse saw the fundamental characteristic of his hero as having "a relationship with the unconscious that is more intimate and less dark than the others"; Antonia S. Byatt recently said that "like her comical ancestors Don Quixote and Mr. Pickwick," hers was an "innocence that caused harm." In any case, the strength of the novel lies in locating a candid, intelligent character and at the same time weighed down by a mental deficit, generous and at peace with himself and with the adversities of fate, in a society not so frivolous and overturned in the material as deranged by doubt, anxiety and dissatisfaction.