Humboldt's Gift | Literary Precedents
As Philip Toynbee has pointed out, Humboldt's Gift is probably America's nearest approach to those great Russian masterpieces, The Idiot (1868) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879-1880) by Dostoevsky. Like Prince Myshkin and Alyosha Karamazov, Charlie Citrine is a comic hero, a holy fool, a soul-searching rascal. All three novels are a spiritual counterattack against the ultimate nullity of a secular society.
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