The Idiot
Prince Myshkin comes back to Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium after years of treatment for epilepsy, penniless, transparently honest, and incapable of taking offense. Between a merchant's son fixated on a kept woman and a general's household with three daughters, his goodness works on everyone around him like a solvent. Dostoevsky set out to draw 'a positively beautiful man' and named Don Quixote and Dickens's Pickwick as the models he was working from.
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Lineage
- modeled on ↑ Don Quixote
- influenced by ↑ The Pickwick Papers
- influenced by ↑ The Last Day of a Condemned Man
Attributes
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Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
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Closest analogues
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