Finished: The Idiot (Dostoevsky). A good but intense, typically long-winded story about a Russian "prince". The prince in this story is Mishkin, who is a 25ish year old Russian orphan who has spent many years at a private Swiss sanatorium for his "illness". Other than epilepsy, I'm not sure what his illness really is except that he's very innocent, naive, trusting, truthful and all around believes the best in people. Not even knowing that he's inherited money, he leaves Switzerland to go and rediscover Russia, where he meets up with all sorts of characters who have a huge impact on his young life. He falls in love with two different women who end up being his undoing emotionally, as well as physically. He thinks he's made friends in society, but most of the people think of him as a simpleton or idiot. In actuality, he's a very deep-thinking person who expresses his thoughts with no filter whatsoever...hence, he is really more of a social idiot, than an intellectual one. He is instantly smitten with the beautiful, yet tragic, "fallen woman" Nastasya Filoppovna, who in turn, is instantly smitten with Mishkin due to his outright honesty and kind regard for her with no ulterior motives. However, Nastasya Filoppovna is fiercely loved by Rogozhin, a rich young Russian heir who happens to be the first person Mishkin meets on the train back to Russia, and ironically ends up being the last person who Mishkin has any intelligible conversation with before he goes back to the sanatorium at the end of the story pretty much out of his wits. The relationship between Mishkin and Rogozhin is one of love/hate, respect/jealousy and absolute need for the other's approval, it seems. After Nastasya Filoppovna runs off with Rogozhin, thinking she's not good enough for Mishkin, Mishkin then falls in love with the youngest daughter of his next acquaintances, the Epanchin family. The beautiful Aglaia is also smitten with Mishkin, but is spoiled and willful, and wants to string him along in typical female games of which he knows nothing. The genuine Mishkin falls prey to her machinations, as well as those of Nastasya Filoppovna; Lebedev, a dishonest character who latches himself to the rich nobles; Ippolit, a consumptive, manipulative teenage boy who plays with people's emotions; Gavril, an angry "middle" class young man who will do almost anything to crack into the upper classes, including nearly marrying both Nastasya AND Aglaia; and several others. There are so many characters in this book, all with complicated names...and most of them concerned primarily with their own personal motives. I was sad to see poor Mishkin at the end regress even further than he apparently ever had been to begin with, not even recognizing people who came to visit him in the end. Sigh. I might be done with Russian literature for awhile, though. Both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy go off on tangents, creating looonnnnggg conversations between characters that allow them to spout their political and religious views, and I tend to glaze over during those parts. I'd much rather just keep reading the dialogue between the characters that moves the story along or that develops the relationships between the characters. However, I can't deny that Dostoevsky is one of the great writers and I was only frustrated with the tangents because his story kept me wanting more! :-)