After taking a break in August, our Reading Group will be back in September. Join us for the next meeting, where we will discuss The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky (available in our bookshop here). The Idiot tells the story of Prince Myshkin, who arrives in St Petersburg after a long period of convalescence and is at once confronted with the stark realities of life in the Russian capital. The meeting will be facilitated by our bookshop co-curator Sasha Padziarei and engagement curator Alisa Oleva.

Dostoevsky’s novel reveals the greed, nihilism, passion, vanity and love of 19th-century St Petersburg through the eyes of Myshkin, a figure mocked for his childlike naivety, who finds himself entangled with two women in a position he cannot bring himself to resolve. Dostoevsky hoped to portray in the character of Prince Myshkin a "wholly virtuous man", showing the workings of the human mind and our relationships with others in all their complex and contradictory nature. Richly populated by an unforgettable cast of characters, from the open and understanding Myshkin, to the beautiful, self-destructive Nastasya Filippovna and the radical student Ippolit, The Idiot is one of Dostoevsky's most personal and intense works of fiction.

“The real nineteenth-century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx” – Albert Camus

2021 saw the opening of Pushkin House’s very own physical bookshop in addition to our online store. While it is still being honed and developed, we are keen to highlight literature that inspires, encourages, moves and validates our readers. We also want to amplify the voices, writers and readers that historically didn’t get and, perhaps, still don’t get the visibility, power and appreciation they deserve. Most of all, we want to create a physical (and an online) place for connection where people can come and share their views.