The film without the cuts. And the book itself.
Goodness enters the room, and everyone is exposed.
Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin
A poor prince arrives with a faded bundle and an almost unbearable openness.
Train to Petersburg
A cold carriage throws three strangers together, and one of them is already dangerous.
As Petersburg emerges, exhaustion and uncertainty press in before anyone has arrived.
Read →Train Through Fog to Petersburg
Towards the end of November, during a thaw, at nine o’clock one morning, a train on the Warsaw and Petersburg railway was approaching the latter city at full speed. The morning was so damp and misty that it was only with great difficulty that the day succeeded in breaking; and it was impossible to distinguish anything more than a few yards away from the carriage windows.
Some of the passengers by this particular train were returning from abroad; but the third-class carriages were the best filled, chiefly with insignificant persons of various occupations and degrees, picked up at the different stations nearer town. All of them seemed weary, and most of them had sleepy eyes and a shivering expression, while their complexions generally appeared to have taken on the colour of the fog outside.
Dostoyevsky drains all distinction out of these people before we've met a single one. The fog outside is so thick that nothing more than a few yards off can be seen, and then the same greyness seeps into the passengers themselves, whose faces have taken on its color. They arrive already blurred, sleepy and shivering and interchangeable, "insignificant persons" picked up at ordinary stations. Into this crowd of nobodies the novel is about to drop two men who will not blend in at all.
The Prince Arrives
A guileless epileptic prince returns to Russia on a foggy train, befriends the dark Rogozhin, and enters a society that mistakes his innocence for idiocy.
Myshkin’s Travel Bundle
A prince steps off the train with everything he owns in one small parcel.
Nastasia Philipovna Barashkova
Her portrait enters rooms before she does, turning beauty into accusation.
The Idiot
The cast, locations, objects of note, core concepts, and selected passages in the Author’s Pen - at your own pace.
The Idiot World, as it plays on your phone
- Meet the people. 24 characters, each with a portrait, who they are and what they want.
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- Taste the original. 52 key passages in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s own words, each with a short reading of what it is doing.
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