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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.
The Idiot
$16.00
Book details
- Format
- Paperback
- Publication date
- August 31, 2004
- ISBN
- 9780140447927
- Publisher
- Penguin Classics
- Pages
- 732
- Language
- English
- Series
- Penguin Classics
- Age range
- 18 and up
- Grade range
- 13 and up
- BISAC
- Fiction, Classics, Literary, Psychological
- Themes
- Russian, Western U.S., Country/Cowboy
- Related subjects
- Russia, Good and evil, Triangles (Interpersonal relations), Princes