The Idiot (Signet Classics)

This, Brothers Karamazov, and Crime and Punishment are BY FAR the greatest novela in man history. Dostoevsky is the GOAT.

Great read from beginning to end. Great for those looking to get into reading!

An inspired, very sad and funny novel. Precious - deliberately presented by Dostoevsky in both senses of the word - and doomed characters. The idiocy of being natural, the emptiness of not being so.

Even though this book geographically sticks within a Euro-Russian boundary, and reminds me a little bit of Jane Eyre, it goes all over the mental map. Of course, at 600 plus pages, it has plenty of room to do so. It strikes me as odd how much this 19th century Russian novel reminds me of present day America. Everyone at some point works in government service (America isn't there yet but seems heading that direction), Catholicism is called anti-Christian, and liberals are accused of rejecting their own nationalism. This was almost 150 years ago on the other side of the world, and yet I see these arguments today more often than I care to. I don't know if this is because of unique similarities between their time and place and my time and place or universal similarities that are present in all eras and cultures.At first I thought the book was inappropriately titled, because people sure seemed rough on the handicapped back then. A guy has a seizure and he's looked down upon like you wouldn't believe. But as I reached the end of the book, I definitely felt the title was appropriate. The man says yes to almost everything and just goes along with what anybody does. Only rarely does he have an actual conviction that he stands up for.This book is pretty unique in that not one, but two of the primary characters are lady trolls. They hate the world around them and do everything they can to mess it up, similar to Andy Kaufman. And anyone who gets involved with that kind of mess can only be called... well.... an idiot.There are a lot of scenes where all heck breaks loose in front of an audience, and these scenes really remind me a lot of the Jerry Springer show. (Again reminding me of present day America). People are humiliated in front of each other and everyone gasps and laughs.I felt this book gave a pretty good demonstration of how much people contradict themselves and each other and are just mentally imbalanced in general, whether they're idiots or not. I felt sorry for the Ganya character, who is doomed to mediocrity, but unlike others who share the same fate, he's actually smart enough to detest it. He wasn't content being fat, dumb, and happy. Yet he could achieve no more than those who were plenty content with such traits. Ouch. Sometimes I feel the same way. Which is probably why I read this book in the first place.I loved this book. It was just too darn long. That's why it gets 4 stars instead of 5. Also, like a good chunk of intellectual fiction that reveals a lot of truth, it's depressing. You see so much of the negativity of the world and realize how little influence you have over it. It's sad that like most other books I read, I'll forget almost all of it within a year or two, but maybe that's a good thing. I may stay away from these kinds of books for a while.

I read as far as I could tolerate into the book, which was about 3/4ths of the book. Decided I was the Idiot forcing myself to read it. It didn't help that the forward of the book gave the plot away. I wonder do the Russian people still think like that today or did they ever?

Dostoyevsky does it again with The Idiot. Fall in love with all the characters and the awkward social situations they come to.

Have this and the McDuff translation. I find myself using this one to clarify mcDuff, but not the other way around, so I prefer this one, but both are great.

The book fell apart. Every page I turned came away from the binding. I don’t think this has ever happened to me. If I finish this before the return date I’ll try to send it back .