Travels with Prince Myshkin

A personal essay

by Jennifer Lynn

15 Feb 2026

FINAL

Travels with Prince Myshkin

One afternoon towards the end of 11^th grade, our English teacher brought in a quiz he’d cut out of the newspaper, one designed to show how uneducated and uncultured our generation was. He was a failed academic who was perpetually incensed at the fact that he was stuck teaching the likes of us, habitually standing at the front of the class listing off our defects, comparing us to the bright young things he’d taught in his small liberal arts college when he was doing his PhD. He read out the questions with an eyebrow raised, scowling at the blank faces and silences. When he asked, ‘Can someone give me the title of a novel by Dostoevsky?’ I put my hand up immediately and shouted out my answer.

‘The Idiot.’

My declaration earned me an eyeroll from the teacher and laughter from the other students, all of whom thought I was being facetious. The teacher snickered and made a sort of game show buzzer noise. The embarrassment brought redness to my cheeks and yet I knew I was right. I knew the answer because the novel was sitting on my mother’s bookcase, and I had seen it only a few days before.

It was a 1970s black Penguin edition with an illustrated cover, a drawing of a doleful man with a curly beard and fair hair that fell across his forehead in a wispy fringe. It had accordioned out over the years, and the spine had begun to give. My mother’s bookshelf was an anomaly, something incongruous with the person she had become. By the time I was a teenager, we had moved to a barrio neighbourhood on the east side of Los Angeles, and my mother had succumbed to an all-consuming alcohol addiction. She spent her days watching comedy re-runs and soap operas, and she spent her nights drinking herself into a stupor.

It shocked me in later years when a friend of the family remarked on how fragile my mother was as a young woman, how she seemed unable to find her voice in groups of people, how she seemed to shake like a leaf in social settings. It didn’t tally with the person I knew, the virago who terrified us with her anger. I do have some very hazy memories of that stranger and vaguely recall sitting at her feet as a child while she played Chopin on the piano, or seeing her sitting in the big green armchair with a book in hand. Those days were long gone by the time I was a teenager.

Our connections to books can sometimes have as much to do with the physical object and its relation to our life at a particular moment in time, as to the words within. Even better, when the words within also connect with you in a way that can only be described as mysterious, perhaps synchronous. I’m not sure how I ended up with the book belonging to my mother, or why I carried it with me from apartment to apartment, and eventually to Ireland where I made my life.

The novel tells the story of Prince Myshkin, a sensitive and naïve young man who returns to St. Petersburg after spending four years in a sanatorium in Switzerland. Some say he is an idiot while others say that there is no one more clever than him. Myshkin is a character whose intelligence is always undermined by his so-called foolishness. When he returns to Russia, he is unaware of, or disinterested in, the societal norms. He dresses like a foreigner and breaks conventions without considering the consequences. He gatecrashes parties, is prone to oversharing details of his personal life or pontificating on philosophical questions to the boredom or laughter of his audience. He is easily taken in by others and takes no offense at even the most insulting behaviour. One might say that Myshkin is unable to read the room. While in a 21^st Century context we might see this behaviour as embarrassing, in 19^th Century Russian high society, it was social suicide. Indeed, Myshkin ends up right in the place he started by the end of the novel, in the sanitorium with his condition having deteriorated to ‘incurable.’

Here was a character who all the other characters called an idiot, and I felt myself strangely identifying with him. Did that make me an idiot, too? I recently came across a Reddit thread where someone asked the question, ‘Why is Prince Myshkin so annoying?’ I got quite defensive. I felt like I had to protect Prince Myshkin from the world as much as I had to protect myself. I was reminded of a book club I’d attended years ago to discuss the novel Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine. When the drinks were ordered and the interminable chat about everyone’s babies, sleep schedules and work-life balance was exhausted, we got into discussing the novel for a period of about ten minutes. Everyone agreed that it was very funny and then began to complain about people at work who reminded them of the eponymous character. I sat there and swallowed the realisation, as well as most of a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, that I was the only person who identified with her.

Okay, I know I’m not perfect, but certainly I’m no idiot. I may be a chronic over sharer who cannot abide things being hidden, cloaked in secrecy, or taboo. I may have a compulsion to say those things out loud, or at least I used to. I have grown so clever at hiding myself from the world that I hardly say anything at all anymore. An old friend of the family’s, a camp red-headed gay man who had taught me gymnastics when I was a kid, upon seeing me as a young adult, said to my mother, ‘I saw this beautiful woman across the room and thought, wow, who is that? And then she opened her mouth.’ This was me, always talking a mile a minute like a bullet train on methamphetamine and in a volume somewhere around the level of a volley of Katyusha rockets. I asked inappropriate questions, let slip people’s secrets, shared graphic details of whatever body horror I was experiencing physically or sexually. Now I stay shtum, doing an in-depth analysis of anything I might say and the reaction it will elicit, and by the time I get around to saying anything at all, the moment has passed. This is what they call social anxiety, and it goes neatly with all the other anxieties I have.

Like Myshkin, I also am drawn towards philosophical questions and can, upon hitting on a belief that rings true, attach myself to it as an article of faith, alienating all those who disagree. Like Myshkin, these are usually beliefs and attitudes that are not shared by the general populace. The thing is, I’m usually right. In fact, I might even say that I’m always right. You see the problem? I am idealistic. I can’t fathom how people are motivated to do bad things that only serve their own interests. I can’t fathom how our society is built on a system that rewards the worst people and abuses the best. I can’t choose the lesser evil. I can’t comprehend people who live their lives only pursuing their own material security and comfort. I get myself in trouble for not recognising hierarchies and social position, being too familiar with people who for some reason think they are superior and should be treated as such. If that makes me an idiot, so be it.

Perhaps I’m not an idiot at all. Maybe I am simply a writer. I think that to Dostoevsky, Prince Myshkin was also a representation of the archetypal writer, and therefore there is much of Prince Myshkin that is autobiographical. Dostoevsky was also unsociable in his younger years, keeping to himself and spending all his money on books. When he earned money, he was never able to hold on to it, chronically in debt and dependent on others. When he did have money, he was taken in by people who sponged off him. He suffered attacks of nervousness and social anxiety, getting very flustered in company. On one occasion, when he was presented to a beautiful woman who he was attracted to, he up and fainted right in front of her. I know this feeling well. One of my unfortunate difficulties is that if I fancy someone, I can hardly bear to look them in the eye or speak to them. I become totally ungrounded to the point of light-headedness. This is a terrible affliction, let me tell you.

While Dostoevsky suffered terribly from epilepsy, he was also a hypochondriac who became obsessed with medical textbooks and self-diagnosis. Take it from someone who was convinced she was dying of AIDS at twelve years of age simply because she had a few spots, hypochondria is no fun. Dostoyevsky suffered bouts of depression, and at times experienced paranoia and hallucinations. He was prone to forgetting his audience and telling wildly inappropriate stories. His gambling addiction and resulting exploits are the stuff of legend. Just like Myshkin in the novel, Dostoevsky was made fun of and called the Poor Knight, a reference to a Don Quixote-type character from a Pushkin poem, a man who is naïve and gives his life blindly to an ideal. At the same time, it is Dostoevsky's ability to see into the heart of things that made him the writer he was. It takes a sort of innocence to be a truly great writer. Maybe all these weird character traits were part and parcel of that.

But, in all seriousness, I think it would be a mistake to limit the reading of a novel like The Idiot to a psychological one, though that is what I was initially drawn to. We often look for kinship in our reading life, we wish to be seen and understood, we yearn for characters we can identify with. When we find such a character, we love them as deeply as we do a good friend. It is often on a second or third read that we push past this boundary to reach something more metaphysical, perhaps even sublime. Prince Myshkin as a character is also a literary device, and one whose perfect goodness is not something that I could ever claim to share. Dostoevsky’s experiment was to ‘to depict an absolutely wonderful person.' He knew that this was a risk and that it was a difficult theme for a novel, most fiction being about characters who are flawed and the mistakes they make. Good characters are often transgressive. The irony at the heart of this novel would be around what happens to a thoroughly good person in an imperfect world.

*

I was rushed into hospital late into my first and only pregnancy, suffering from pre-eclampsia and requiring emergency delivery. I had my copy of The Idiot with me, the one that I had taken from my mother’s bookshelf. The spine was taped together with masking tape, the title handwritten onto it with a sharpie. In the twenty-four hours that I waited for the medications to kick in and induce labour, I started to read the novel for the second time in my life. The young registrar arrived to measure the dilation of my cervix, and as he began his examination, he noticed my book on the bedside table.

‘Some tome you have there,’ he said. From the look on his face, I could see that it was out of the ordinary for a patient to bring a 700-page Russian novel into the maternity hospital.

There was something about the prospect of becoming a mother that caused me to pick this novel off the shelf rather than any of the others. I finished the novel in the days after my daughter was born, after an emergency C-section that resulted in a five-day hospital stay. It was the first book I read as a mother, the same one that had sat in my mother’s bookshelf for so many years, dog-eared and well-worn with her name neatly written on the inside cover. I never had a chance to ask her what it was about the novel that spoke to her. She had died six years before my daughter’s birth. Something about the confluence of these events, birth and death, of having had a difficult mother and then of becoming a mother, of the passing of time and of youth, and the yearning for some sort of understanding of the human condition, coincided with a desire to re-read this novel.

*

Dostoevsky became a father for the first time shortly after sending his final draft of The Idiot off to the publishers. His wife had been pregnant for much of the time he was working on it. He doted on his little daughter Sonya, nearly giving up writing completely to spend all his time with her, awed by her beatific smile. The novel is imbued with the hopefulness of fatherhood, the belief in the innocence and purity of new life. In a way, it is a novel about childhood. Myshkin is a character who feels totally alienated in the company of adults but at home with children. He is a child-like character himself. One of the greatest tragedies in Dostoevsky’s life was the loss of his little Sonya in her first year of life, an event which nearly destroyed him.

Walter Benjamin wrote, in a review of The Idiot published in 1921, ‘It is always apparent in Dostoevsky that only in the spirit of childhood does the noble development of human life spring from the spirit of the common people.’ While Benjamin’s review focuses on the formation of the individual in relation to the nation, ‘within the aura of the Russian spirit,’ and his purpose was partially to lament the failures of the youth movement influenced by European Nihilism, he elucidates a philosophical concept of immortality that I found so beautiful in its utter simplicity.

‘Of Prince Myshkin we may say indeed that his individuality is secondary to his life, just as a flower’s is to its perfume, or a star’s to its light. Immortal life is unforgettable; that is the sign by which we recognise it… Such life remains unforgettable even without form or vessel. And ‘unforgettable’ does not just mean that we cannot forget it. It points to something in the nature of the unforgettable itself, something that makes it unforgettable.’

Benjamin writes that the word for this life in its immortality is youth. I might go as far as to say that it is innocence. It is something akin to potential. It is that feeling you have when looking at a picture of yourself from childhood and recognising something so uniquely you, while at the same time wondering when it was you lost touch with that part of yourself.

*

I thought a lot about my mother in those early days of motherhood. For many years after her death, my memories of her were negative. I found it difficult to see past the traumas of my early life. Slowly, a clearer picture of her began to emerge, as when the snow settles in a shaken snow globe. What remained of her was light. There was an innocence in my mother that no amount of degradation could snuff out, a purity of spirit one might say, or perhaps an unforgettableness. It was what lived on after her, but it was also what doomed her to so much pain. In Prince Myshkin we see a character that no matter how good and pure of heart, is unable to live within the confines of the real world. He may be Christ-like, but like Christ, he must be crucified. When I held my daughter for the first time, I truly saw what a creature of pure innocence was. It was a blindingly beautiful experience, and yet I was filled with fear of the world that she’d been born into.

Dostoevsky always wrote with such love for his characters, even in their worst moments and when they had done terrible things. So many of his characters display some sort of madness or instability, and he writes with such authenticity on alcoholism, suicides, epilepsy, addictions and so on. In this way, the writer is like God and can look upon his fellow man without judgement but with understanding. ‘When a man is dissatisfied, when he hasn’t the means to show what is best in him, to express himself fully (not out of vanity, but because of the urgent necessity of realising himself), he at once gets involved in some quite incredible situation; he takes to the bottle, or becomes a gambler, or a rabid duellist,’ Dostoevsky wrote. The expression of that self, the best self, is the expression of that very same immortal thing, our innocence. I thought a lot about my mother and her addiction, about that part of her that was so nearly snuffed out through poverty, lack of opportunities, and being married off too young. I think about that gentle creature who she once was, playing Chopin and reading Dostoevsky. 

I don’t think that Prince Myshkin is an idiot, though that might be the term used in 19^th Century Russia for such a person. I think Prince Myshkin is one of literature’s most enduring neurodiverse characters, and I reckon that Dostoevsky may have been neurodiverse himself. In later years, when my daughter reached school age, she was diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Condition. I was initially antagonistic to the idea, but through a long clinical process and discussion with psychologists and speech and language therapists, eventually the penny dropped. Not only did I understand, but I began to reevaluate my own childhood. I started to understand my mother better; her obsessions and special interests, her anxiety, her inability to function socially, and her eventual retreat into addictive behaviours due to having never received any adequate support – something I repeated in my own life. I began to wonder what both my own and my mother’s lives would have been like if we had been better supported from a young age. I have never sought an official diagnosis for myself, though I feel quite comfortable and even proud of identifying myself as neurodiverse because it has allowed me to accept myself and to negotiate the world around me better. Acceptance of our neurodiversity has allowed me to not make the same mistakes with my daughter that were made with myself and my mother.

The copy of The Idiot that I brought from my mother’s house was destroyed at some stage, the spine finally giving way and the pages all coming loose. I mourned the loss of that physical copy of the novel. It was an object that was imbued with something tangible of my mother and the reading of it brought me closer to her. I would always wonder if she also identified with Myshkin, and if that was the reason that the book was so well-worn even when I first retrieved it from her bookshelf. For me, this novel was a sort of through line from the high-octane teenager that I was to the more self-aware adult that I became, the one who was able to forgive and to move on, the one who finally learned to love myself and to really love others.

Despite the remarkable personal growth, I’m afraid that when I think back to my high school English teacher, I am less able to let go. That day in class, he stood up in front of the board and wrote in big capital letters, Crime and Punishment. We could hear the chalk clack and squeak as he finished with a flourish and drew a squiggly line underneath. With one eyebrow raised and his hands on his hips, he said, ‘Dostoevsky wrote one of the greatest novels of all time. It’s no surprise to me that not a single one of you has heard of it. I suggest you put it on your reading list, if you care even slightly about being cultured.’

One of the students put his hand up timidly and asked, genuinely interested in why this novel was so important, ‘What is it about?’

The teacher seemed surprised by the question and looked up to the ceiling as if in deep contemplation.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘It’s about crime…’

We waited patiently as he searched the inner recesses of his soul for something brilliant and erudite to say to us. We wanted him to tell us what relevance this great novel might have to our urban, American, inner-city lives. Having read the novel as an adult, I could have come up with a multitude of reasons why this novel would have spoken to our teenage selves. Unfortunately, the teacher was unable to rise to the occasion.

‘…and punishment,’ he finished with a visible sense of deflation.

He picked up the eraser and held it up momentarily before turning his back on us and erasing the words on the board, making it evident to us all that he had never read it himself, and leaving me to wonder who the real idiot was.

AUTHOR BIO

Jennifer Lynn is originally from Los Angeles but lives in County Wicklow, Ireland. Her short stories and poems have appeared in The Honest Ulsterman, Prole, Howl, Puca, Anti-Heroin Chic, and others. She was an Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair winner in 2024, and has been a recipient of the Arts Council Agility Award Grants in 2021 and 2022.

Twitter @TerpsichoreDubh

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