Finished Dostoevsky's "The Idiot" and the ending absolutely wrecked me

By photongoose

I finished *The Idiot* a couple weeks back and I haven’t really picked anything else up since. The ending just wrecked me, and I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. Myshkin is so innocent and “clean” as a person that it almost feels Christ-like, which somehow makes everything worse. The way he holds Rogozhin at the end after Rogozhin kills Nastasya and then basically helps him look at what happened… that part was brutal. I also feel like he’s kind of too good for his own life, and by the time you get to the end he really does end up fitting the title. I’ve read *Crime and Punishment* and *Notes from the Underground*, plus this, and I’m planning to go into *The Brothers Karamazov* next. Honestly, I thought this was at least on the same level as *Crime and Punishment*—maybe even matching it for how much I enjoyed it. Dostoevsky really seems to understand people, and you can feel that in the characters.