As Philip Toynbee has pointed out, Humboldt's Gift is probably America's nearest approach to those great Russian masterpieces, The Idiot (1868) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880) by Dostoevsky. Like Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov, Charlie Citrine is a comic hero, a holy fool, a soulsearching rascal. All three novels are a spiritual counterattack against the ultimate nullity of a secular society.