The Idiot

Fyodor Dostoyevsky; David McDuff; William Mills Todd
Penguin Publishing Group
 9780140447927
0-14-044792-X

The most autobiographical novel by the author of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazovand the namesake of Elif Batumans debut novel, The Idiot Returning to St Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium,.

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the gentle and nave epileptic Prince Myshkin known as the idiotpays 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.