An Innocent Abroad

Director Pierre Léon’s gambit is to focus on a single scene, honing in on it with an almost play-by-play fidelity to the book. As such, it’s the most concentrated rendition of the story, but in its own way, curiously expansive.

ANY ATTEMPT AT A CINEMATIC ADAPTATION OF Dostoevsky’s The Idiot must first contend with what Andrei Tarkovsky called the “architectonics” of the novel. As he puts it in the notes for his own unmade version, “there are two epicenters in the novel, both creations of genius, separated by nearly five hundred pages. Between them lie two massive parts—the second and third, which are a kind of summary of the first explosion…and the start of a new exposition…”

Dostoevsky’s attempt to depict “the positively good and beautiful man,” tells the story of Prince Myshkin, who is afflicted not with any lack of intelligence but rather with innocence and epilepsy. Myshkin returns to Saint darkly fixated on her. The first of the two “epicenters,” as Tarkovsky aptly put it, takes place at Nastasya Filippovna’s birthday party, an event that brings together almost all of the principal characters and climaxes with 100,000 rubles (a sum equivalent to more than a million contemporary dollars) flying into the fireplace. The second is the novel’s denouement, which for our purposes can remain unspoiled.