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"Beauty will save the world." I love the depth and pathos of Dostoevsky's writing and "The Idiot" might be my favorite book yet. The author decided to imagine what might happen to "the perfectly guileless man" in a world gone wrong. His hero, Prince Myshkin, is that man and his innocent goodness earns him the moniker "The Idiot." (Given how the intelligent and religious people reacted to Jesus, it stands to reason.) Prince Myshkin returns to Russia after spending time in a foreign hospital being treated for epilepsy. He is certainly inclined to view everyone and everything through rose colored glasses, but the novel demonstrates that he is absolutely not "an idiot". He understands people better than they understand themselves and sees the good in everyone, even the fallen woman, Nastasya Filippovna, who eventually wrecks his life by jerking him around and then running off with the man who abused her. In fact, it is demonstrated again and again that the truly mad or "idiotic" people are the ones who claim to know a lot of the world and thus to look on everything with a jaundiced eye. Still, those people do set out to ruin the perfectly innocent man and do in many ways succeed. Determined to see the good in everyone, Myshkin gives his love to an undeserving individual who breaks his heart and drives him back to insanity. In the end, Dostoevsky seems to suggest that while the world would be a better place if we could follow "The Idiot", that the chances of maintaining goodness without going mad are not great in a world determined to crush innocence at every opportunity.