Dostoevsky - The Idiot - A Philosophical Guide

Hello everyone. I’m Stephen West! This is Philosophize This!

There’s a story from Dostoevsky’s life that’s usually one of the first things you hear about him when you start looking into his work. I personally think the story resonates a bit better when you already know a little about what he was going for when he wrote, which at this point we do, this being the fourth book we’ve covered of the five great novels from Dostoevsky.

The story is about the time in his life that he almost got shot by a firing squad. Classic story I’m sure he used to tell around the campfire to all the kids.

There’s a couple different versions of this story. One version comes from the main character of the book we’re talking about today; it’s called The Idiot.

We’ll talk more about the book here in a second, but first it’s important to understand how some of the intense experiences that Dostoevsky had in his life led to the conclusions in the rest of his work.

Conclusions about what he thinks a good life is. His views on beauty and love and more specifically what he means when he says a now famous quote that’s been associated with this book, The Idiot: what did he mean when he said that he thought that “beauty will save the world”?

There’s a lot of discussion centered around this statement, and we’ll be a lot closer to understanding it by the end of this post.

When Dostoevsky’s writing the book Demons we just talked about, and when he talks about a revolutionary cell that’s planning stuff to potentially bring down the government in the book, that’s not him sitting around method acting what it would be like to be a revolutionary.

No, early in his writing career, he really was a member of what’s now known as the Petrashevsky circle. Meaning he was part of one of these revolutionary groups, which is part of what gives him so much insight into the psychology of these kinds of people.

So, like any revolutionary at the time that’s living in Tsarist Russia, he was always at high risk of being prosecuted. Turns out Russia doesn’t take too kindly to you if you’re plotting to overthrow the government every day.

And as the story goes Dostoevsky gets arrested. He gets processed, charged, and sentenced to