The Idiot
Fyodor Dostoevsky · first published 1869
Filmed from 1921 onward, and once transplanted whole to postwar Japan.
11 versions · 1921–2011 · screen, stage
Kurosawa’s Hakuchi (1951) moves Dostoevsky’s Petersburg to snowbound Hokkaido and keeps almost everything else, including the length — the studio cut it savagely and the director never forgave them.
The novel sets out to portray “a positively good man” and then watches a society destroy him for it. That is very hard to film, because goodness has no gestures.
Written abroad, in flight from creditors, 1868
Dostoevsky wrote it in Switzerland and Italy, moving from city to city to stay ahead of his debts, having recently lost heavily at roulette. His first child died in Geneva while he was working on it.
He was also writing four years after the great reforms had begun to unsettle Russian society, and about a country in which a man with no money and no cunning was simply material. The plan, he told his niece, was to portray a positively good man — the hardest thing in the world, he said, because goodness has nothing to show.
On screen
9Film and television, earliest first.
- 1921 Wandering Souls Carl Froelich
- 1946 The Idiot Georges Lampin
- 1951 The Idiot Akira Kurosawa
- 1958 Idiot Ivan Pyryev
- 1966 Au Hasard Balthazar Robert Bresson
- 1994 Nastasja Andrzej Wajda
- 2001 Down House Roman Kachanov
- 2003 The Idiot Vladimir Bortko
- 2011 The Idiot Rainer Sarnet
On stage
2Opera, musical theatre and ballet made from it.
- — L'idiota Luciano Chailly
- — The Idiot Mieczysław Weinberg
Versions are listed where they are documented. A century of stage productions and most broadcasts were never catalogued at all, so this is what can be shown rather than everything that was ever made.