Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1869 · exile

Dostoevsky set out to write a perfectly good man and put him in Russia to see what happened. Prince Myshkin comes down from a Swiss sanatorium on the Warsaw train, is taken up by Petersburg society for his money and his strangeness, and destroys everyone he tries to help - including himself.

1. 1
   Switzerland

   Four years in a sanatorium for epilepsy, paid for by a benefactor now dead - and Prince Myshkin comes down out of the mountains at twenty-six with a bundle, no money, and no defences of any kind.

2. 2
   Warsaw

   The train east, and the opening scene: a third-class carriage at nine in the morning, thawing windows, and Myshkin falling into conversation with Rogozhin, who is going the same way and is in love with the same woman.

3. 3
   St Petersburg

   The Yepanchin house, the Ivolgins, and Nastasya Filippovna throwing a hundred thousand roubles into the fire to see what a room full of people will do - which is the scene the first part exists for.

4. 4
   Pavlovsk

   The summer suburb, dachas and a bandstand, where the whole cast reassembles for the long middle of the novel - and where Myshkin is engaged to Aglaya and cannot stop being kind to the woman who will ruin it.

5. 5
   Moscow

   Six months Dostoevsky covers in a paragraph: Nastasya runs to Moscow, Myshkin follows, Rogozhin follows him, and the three of them do the same thing to each other in a different city.

6. 6
   St Petersburg

   Rogozhin's dark house on the Gorokhovaya, and the last pages - two men lying either side of a bed through a night that has no comfort in it at all, which is the ending everyone remembers.

7. 7
   Switzerland

   Back to the sanatorium, worse than he left it, paid for by the same people who could not use him - and Dostoevsky's attempt to write a perfectly good man ending exactly where it started, having proved his point.