Of course, it is the title to one of Dostoevsky’s lesser known works — or one which few have read. The author, of course, is the great Russian novelist — who wrote long and arduous depictions of psychological compendiums that only a person of great patience can read.
It is assigned in some high schools; perhaps, still in some colleges; then, after exiting the world of academia, it is quickly forgotten. It is like many books: claimed to have been read by many, but which are actually only glanced by a very few.
There are other books similar to it: Not in plot or character, but in the fact that few read them — Tolstoy’s works; Arno Schmidt’s, Bottom’s Dream; and others. But of The Idiot — its central character is a man who is simple and good, but it is in his simplicity and goodness by which people question his intellectual intactness.
And there is a point to that, isn’t there? We have become so tainted with cynicism that we equate moral virtue with cautionary ineptitude.
For Federal employees and U.S. Postal workers who suffer from a medical condition such that the medical condition prevents the Federal or Postal employee from performing one or more of the essential elements of one’s Federal or Postal job — be wary of approaching your agency, your postal manager, your Human Resource Office, or even the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, with an attitude of simplicity and goodness. For, if you do, you may end up like the character in Dostoevsky’s work, The Idiot.
Instead, contact a Federal Disability Attorney who specializes in Federal Disability Retirement Law to help you maneuver through the bureaucratic morass of a Federal Disability Retirement application, lest you end up being characterized by that term in the truly pejorative sense of the word.
Sincerely,
Robert R. McGill, Lawyer
OPM Disability Retirement, Et Cetera… 