Episode #221 ... Dostoevsky - The Idiot

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  Hello everyone.

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  I'm Steven West.

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  This is Philosophize This.

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  So there's a story from Dostoevsky's life that's usually one of the first things you hear about him when you start looking into his work.

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  I personally think the story hits a bit better when you already know a little bit about what he was going for in his work,

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  which at this point we do, this episode being part four in the series we've been doing.

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  That said, the story's about the time in Dostoevsky's life that he almost got shot by a firing squad.

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  Classic story, I'm sure he used to tell around the campfire to all the kids.

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  And one version of the story that we have comes from the main character of the book we're talking about today,

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  another one of the five great novels of Dostoevsky.

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  It's called The Idiot.

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  We'll talk more about the book here in a second, but first let's hear this story, though,

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  and understand how some of the intense experiences that Dostoevsky had in his life led to the conclusions in the rest of his work,

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  to what he thinks a good life is,

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  to his views on beauty and love,

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  and more specifically what he means when he says a now famous quote that's been associated with this book,

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  The Idiot, what did he mean when he said that he thought that beauty will save the world?

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  There's been a lot of discussion surrounding this particular quote,

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  and we'll be a lot closer to understanding it by the end of the episode here today.

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  See, when Dostoevsky's writing the book Demons, we just talked about,

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