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The Idiot

The Idiot

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Add This - The Idiot

Written by Fyodor DostoevskyAuthor Alerts: Random House will alert you to new works by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Translated by Richard PevearAuthor Alerts: Random House will alert you to new works by Richard Pevear and Larissa VolokhonskyAuthor Alerts: Random House will alert you to new works by Larissa Volokhonsky

  • Format: Trade Paperback, 656 pages
    •  
  • Publisher: Vintage
  • On Sale: July 8, 2003
  • Price: $16.00
  • ISBN: 978-0-375-70224-2 (0-375-70224-5)
Also available as a hardcover, paperback and a trade paperback.
about this book

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s masterful translation of The Idiot is destined to stand with their versions of Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Demons as the definitive Dostoevsky in English.

After his great portrayal of a guilty man in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky set out in The Idiot to portray a man of pure innocence. The twenty-six-year-old Prince Myshkin, following a stay of several years in a Swiss sanatorium, returns to Russia to collect an inheritance and “be among people.” Even before he reaches home he meets the dark Rogozhin, a rich merchant’s son whose obsession with the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna eventually draws all three of them into a tragic denouement. In Petersburg the prince finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with money, power, and manipulation. Scandal escalates to murder as Dostoevsky traces the surprising effect of this “positively beautiful man” on the people around him, leading to a final scene that is one of the most powerful in all of world literature.

“Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, justly acclaimed for their translations of such Russian classics as Gogol’s Dead Souls and Dostoyevski’s The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground, have now undertaken another major Dostoyevski novel, The Idiot. Their trademark style—fresh, crisp and faithful to the original (bumps and blemishes included)—brings the story of naïve, truth-telling Prince Myshkin to new life. As is true of their other translations of Dostoyevski, this will likely be the definitive edition for years to come.”—Publishers Weekly