No apology necessary. If anything, you confirmed in my mind what I thought. The Idiot may well have been an cathartic for Dostoyevski. Maybe that's how he sees himself - a pure person trying to do right amidst a bunch of sleazy people.

It's not that I don't think that there are some people who really are more 'pure' than others or more evil than others (like old man karamazov). It's just that I think there are more people lying somewhere on a spectrum between those extremes.

Tolstoy might not have had the worst life, but it wasn't the best, either. It was, it seems to me, a life largely based on service and the improvement of humanity.