Idiot (Version 2)

Length: 29h 5m
Chapters: 50
Language: English
Genre: Literary Fiction

Dostoyevsky considered “The Idiot” (published first in Russian in 1869) his “favourite child” — the novel in which he felt the greatest personal investment. We meet Lef Nicolaievitch Muishkin, a hereditary prince of the old Russian aristocracy, returning from abroad after only partially successful treatment for epilepsy. (Dostoyevsky himself was a lifelong sufferer from temporal lobe epilepsy, sometimes called “ecstatic” epilepsy. Experts have suggested that modern physicians would do well to study Dostoyevsky’s depiction of the condition.) Because of the debilitating severity of the disease during Muishkin’s childhood, people have come to think of him as an “idiot,” but in fact he is no …