FEBRUARY: The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Name: FEBRUARY: The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Start: 2026-02-03T08:00:00+13:00
Location: The Library, 1/53 Courtenay Place

Schedule

Tue, 03 Feb, 2026 at 08:00 am

UTC+13:00

Location

The Library, 1/53 Courtenay Place | Wellington, WG

We return to Russia for our long summer read! The group's first ever summer book was Anna Karenina and we read Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov over the 2018/19 summer. (We were also due to discuss his novel Crime and Punishment, but that was set down for April 2020 and, well, the world had other plans…)
This year we read another of Fyodor Dostoevsky's masterworks: The Idiot, which was initially published as a serial in 1868-1869. Dostoevsky scholar Joseph Frank said The Idiot "is the most personal of all his major works, the book in which he embodies his most intimate, cherished, and sacred convictions".
The story revolves around Prince Lef Nicolaievitch Muishkin, a young man returning to Russia after spending several years in a Swiss sanatorium for epilepsy. Dostoevsky had set out to create a protagonist with "a truly beautiful soul" and to trace the fate of such an individual as he comes into contact with the brutal reality of contemporary society.
Photo: The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb by Hans Holbein, which features in the novel.
VENUE
We meet in the ‘Games Room’, The Library's private area overlooking Courtenay Place. After you enter the bar, head to your right (up the step) and through a smaller space with booths to the large carpeted space beyond.
SPREADSHEET OF BOOKS READ
Check out this handy spreadsheet of all the books we have read since the group started in 2013: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1c8GLoxKOJkWsInMDnEUm9YXPSVcvsIxgOReo67G0jzI/