THE IDIOT by FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

The appeal of this Novel is the grand concept of bringing to the outside World the Holy Russian tradition of the Holy Fool that can , if only Russia itself believes in them rather than being embroiled in wasteful Francophile dreams , can bring to the forefront the Slavic Nation and Spiritual vision that can redeem not only Russia , but the World.Nothing less than a Slavic solution for a Slavic problem.

Alas the execution , through a mixture of financial constraints at the time in Dostoyevskys life and the flaw of any concept that brings a Manifest Destiny in a Nation becoming a self-appointed Spiritual Guardian of the Races , does not , and could never , match the vision.Technically , Dostoyevsky would work on a single draft whilst his previous only copy would be getting printed by the publishers , thus giving him no working copy of the previous installment so that he could get all the threads of the story together in a coherent order.The supreme biographer of Dostoyevsky , Joseph Franks calls it right when he states the book is "perhaps the most original of Dostoevsky's great novels, and certainly the most artistically uneven of them all,".That statement very much comes across as you admire the incredible undertaking whilst also regret the forced , awkward rush of something that deserves the artist getting the space needed to proclaim such a monument to the world.
Many portions he dictated as he walked around the Room , not knowing himself the direction the work would take , and if he did decide to change tact he had no way of recalling the already printed previous draft from the publishers if he , as he done many times with other Novels , wanted to change direction with the plot or characters.

This excellent review by AS Byatt gives a very good account of the strains and stresses Dostoyevsky was under as well as the concept behind the Book and why , despite its execution , it is regarded as a masterpiece of sheer effort of an artist trying to speak The Spirit to the Masses.

"I think The Idiot to be a masterpiece - flawed, occasionally tedious or overwrought, like many masterpieces - but a fact of world literature just as important as the densely dramatic Brothers Karamazov or the brilliantly subtle and terrifying Devils . In those two novels, as in the simpler Crime and Punishment , Dostoevsky had plots and political and religious ideas working together. In The Idiot he is straining to grasp a story and a character converting themselves from Gothic to Saint's Life on the run. What makes the greatness is double -the character of the prince, and a powerful series of confrontations with death. The true subject of The Idiot is the imminence and immanence of death. The image of these things is Holbein's portrait of Christ taken down from the cross, a copy of which hangs in Rogozhin's house, and which was seen by both Dostoevsky and Prince Myshkin in Basle. It represents, we are told, a dead man who is totally flesh without life, damaged and destroyed, with no hint of a possible future resurrection. The form of the novel is shaped by the inexorable outbreak of Dostoevsky's deepest preoccupations. It is the quality of Dostoevsky's doubt and fear that is the intense religious emotion in this novel - to which Lawrence was no doubt reacting."