SOURCE: Tucker, Janet G. “Dostoevsky's Idiot: Defining Myshkin.” New Zealand Slavonic Journal (1997): 23-40.

In the following essay, Tucker discusses the character of Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, asserting that he is much more complex than most critics have defined him.

The Idiot is not only the least debated of Dostoevsky's novels; it is also the least understood and frequently misrepresented.¹

Few of Dostoevsky's characters seem more elusive or incompletely realised than Lev Myshkin, eponymous hero of The Idiot. Critics have typically defined Myshkin as Dostoevsky's realisation of a Christlike figure and left him at that.² His slipperiness is compounded by the concomitant presence in critical writing of a “‘legendary’ Myshkin [who is] largely the creation of a group of commentators writing in the 1880s, the chief and long-discredited culprit being De Vogüé.”³ But considering Myshkin solely or even primarily in these terms strips both hero and novel of...