Dostoevsky said that Prince Myshkin was his Russian Don Quixote: a man too good for a cynical world.
Dostoevsky's phrase
When creating Prince Myshkin, the protagonist of The Idiot, Dostoevsky claimed to be writing a Russian Don Quixote: a figure of absolute kindness and naivety, thrown into an environment that does not know how to receive him.
The parallel
Myshkin is not ridiculed for being foolish, but for not playing the game of cynicism. That's what the Dukes do with Don Quixote and Sancho. The difference between the Spanish nobility and the Russian elite is one of degree, not of nature: both transform purity into a spectacle.
What changes
In Dostoevsky, suffering is existential and psychological; in Cervantes, it is cruel comedy. But the question is the same in both works: who is the real madman, the one who believes too much or the one who doesn't believe in anything?
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Why is Myshkin called the Russian Don Quixote?
Because Dostoevsky conceived him as a man of radical kindness and naivety in a cynical world, in the style of Don Quixote. The author himself made the comparison.
What unites The Idiot and Don Quixote?
The figure of the innocent who disarms and exposes the moral poverty of the surrounding society, and who therefore becomes the target of mockery and manipulation.
What is the difference between the two works?
In Dostoevsky the tone is tragic and psychological; in Cervantes, comic and satirical. The diagnosis of social cruelty, however, is similar.
Continue: One, None and One Hundred Thousand and identity · Don Quixote, Part 2: summary and analysis · Macbeth and Raskolnikov: the anatomy of guilt
Source class (YouTube): Dom Quixote, Parte Dois (NousCast) · O Idiota, de Dostoiévski (NousCast)