The Idiot

Author(s): Fyodor Dostoyevsky; David McDuff (Translator)

Classics

The most autobiographical novel by the author of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov – and the namesake of Elif Batuman's debut novel, The Idiot.  


Returning to St Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, the gentle and naive epileptic Prince Myshkin – known as the "idiot" – pays a visit to his distant relative General Yepanchin and proceeds to charm the General and his family. But his life is thrown into turmoil when he chances on a photograph of the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna. Utterly infatuated, he soon finds himself caught up in a love triangle and drawn into a web of blackmail, betrayal, and finally, murder. In Prince Myshkin, Dostoyevsky portrays the purity of "a truly beautiful soul" and explores the perils that innocence and goodness face in a corrupt world.  


David McDuff's translation brilliantly captures the novel's idiosyncratic and dream-like language and the nervous, elliptic flow of the narrative. This edition also contains an introduction by William Mills Todd III, which is a fascinating examination of the pressures on Dostoyevsky as he wrote the story of his Christ-like hero.


Product Information

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General Fields

  • : 9780140447927
  • : Penguin Books, Limited
  • : Penguin Books, Limited
  • : 0.548
  • : November 2004
  • : 19.7 x 12.9 x 4.65 cm
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Fyodor Dostoyevsky; David McDuff (Translator)
  • : FC
  • : 784
  • : 891.73/3
  • : English
  • : 1
  • : Paperback