The Idiot Paperback by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Translated with Notes by David McDuff; Introduction by William Mills Todd III

Product Details

• Publisher: Penguin Classics (2004-08-31)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 784 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780140447927
• Item Weight: 532.98 grams
• Dimensions: 7.75 x 5.07 x 1.35 cm

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 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.
 
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.

About the Author

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian novelist, journalist, and short-story writer whose novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov rank among the greatest of the nineteenth century.
 
David McDuff (translator) has translated many works of nineteenth-century Russian literature, including works by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Leskov for Penguin Classics.
 
William Mills Todd III (introducer) is a professor of Slavic languages at Harvard.