Idiot (Version 2)

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 st