The Idiot
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Pages: 768
Language: English
Published: 2004-08-31
ISBN: 9780140447927
Sign in to buy, swap or exchange this book with readers.
About this book
<b>The most autobiographical novel by the author of <i>Crime and Punishment </i>and <i>The Brothers Karamazov—</i>and the namesake of Elif Batuman’s debut novel, <i>The Idiot</i></b><br> <br> Returning to St Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, the gentle and naïve 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. <br> <br> 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.
Join the Bookberry community
Discuss "The Idiot", share your review, swap it with other readers, and discover what the community says about this book.
Sign in to Bookberry