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This version of The Idiot, made for the Russian TV, is actually the first attempt to film the Fyodor Dostoyevsky novel in its entirety. Yevgeny Mironov plays the title character, Russian Prince Myshkin, who returns to St. Petersburg after a stay in a Swiss mental hospital. The prince is not literally a mental midget; he is considered an idiot because, as an honest and upright person, he cannot keep pace with the evil in the world. He busies himself with the petty problems of his aristocratic friends, which drive him back into the recesses of insanity. Lidiya Velezheva co-stars as Nastassya Filippovna, the woman of loose morals who turns out to be the only person who truly cares about Myshkin's welfare, while Vladimir Mashkov plays the nominal villain of the piece, an iconoclastic merchant named Rogozhin, whose passion for Nastassya culminates in tragedy. The Idiot was previously filmed in France in 1946, in Japan by Akira Kurosawa in 1951, and in Russia in 1958.