Critical reception of The Idiot at the time of its publication in Russia was almost uniformly negative. This was partly because a majority of the reviewers considered themselves to be opposed to Dostoevsky's 'conservatism', and wished to discredit the book's supposed political intentions.[65] However the chief criticism, among both reviewers and general readers, was in the "fantasticality" of the characters.[66] The radical critic D.I. Minaev wrote: "People meet, fall in love, slap each other's face—and all at the author's first whim, without any artistic truth."[67] V.P. Burenin, a liberal, described the novel's presentation of the younger generation as "the purest fruit of the writer's subjective fancy" and the novel as a whole as "a belletristic compilation, concocted from a multitude of absurd personages and events, without any concern for any kind of artistic objectivity."[68] Leading radical critic Mikhail Saltykov-Schedrin approved of Dostoevsky's attempt to depict the genuinely good man, but castigated him for his scurrilous treatment of "the very people whose efforts are directed at the very objective apparently pursued by him... On the one hand there appear characters full of life and truth, but on the other, some kind of mysterious puppets hopping about as though in a dream..."[69] Dostoevsky responded to Maykov's reports of the prevailing 'fantastical' criticisms with an unashamed characterization of his literary philosophy as "fantastic realism", and claimed that it was far more real, taking contemporary developments in Russia in to consideration, than the so-called realism of his detractors, and could even be used to predict future events.[66]
French and English translations were published in 1887, and a German translation in 1889. European critical response was also largely negative, mainly due to the novel's apparent formlessness and rambling style.[70] Morson notes that critics saw it as "a complete mess, as if it were written extemporaneously, with no overall structure in mind—as, in fact, it was."[71] Typical of the western critics was the introduction to the first French translation which, while praising the energetic style and characterization, notes that "they are enveloped in a fantastic mist and get lost in innumerable digressions."[72]
Prominent modern critics acknowledge the novel's apparent structural deficiencies, but also point out that the author was aware of them himself, and that they were perhaps a natural consequence of the experimental approach toward the central idea. Joseph Frank has called The Idiot "perhaps the most original of Dostoevsky's great novels, and certainly the most artistically uneven of them all,"[73] but he also wondered how it was that the novel "triumphed so effortlessly over the inconsistencies and awkwardnesses of its structure." Gary Saul Morson observes that "The Idiot brings to mind the old saw about how, according to the laws of physics, bumblebees should be unable to fly, but bumblebees, not knowing physics, go on flying anyway."[71]
The twentieth century Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin regarded the structural asymmetry and unpredictability of plot development, as well as the perceived 'fantasticality' of the characters, not as any sort of deficiency, but as entirely consistent with Dostoevsky's unique and groundbreaking literary method.[74] Bakhtin saw Dostoevsky as the preeminent exemplar of the Carnivalesque in literature, and as the inventor of the polyphonic novel. A literary approach that incorporates carnivalisation and polyphony in Bakhtin's sense precludes any sort of conventionally recognizable structure or predictable pattern of plot development.
