The Idiot
There's something quietly devastating about a good person placed inside a bad world. That's the central tension Dostoyevsky builds his novel around, and it's one he never lets you forget. Prince Myshkin, returning to St Petersburg after a spell recovering in a Swiss sanatorium, is gentle, epileptic, and almost childlike in his openness. He charms the Yepanchin family almost immediately. Then he sees a photograph of the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna, and everything unravels. What follows pulls him into blackmail, betrayal, and ultimately murder. Short version: goodness doesn't protect you. It might even make things worse. Dostoyevsky drew on the image of a suffering Christ when conceiving Myshkin, hoping to show what a 'truly beautiful soul' would look like when dropped into a society driven by greed and self-interest. The novel asks, with considerable discomfort, whether such purity can survive at all. David McDuff's translation handles the novel's strange, nervy rhythm with real skill. The prose has a quality that's hard to pin down, dreamlike but also jittery, and McDuff keeps both qualities alive throughout. As the New York Times Book Review noted, his language is 'rich and alive.' William Mills Todd III contributes an introduction that sheds genuine light on the pressures surrounding Dostoyevsky as he wrote, including his debts and the particular ambitions he had for his Christ-like protagonist. This Penguin Classics edition is a fine way into one of Dostoyevsky's most emotionally strange and morally serious novels. Readers who find it lingers with them might also appreciate Chekhov's Ward No. 6 and Other Stories, equally preoccupied with suffering and the limits of human compassion.
- Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Publisher: Penguin Classics
- Genre: Classic Literature
- ISBN: 978-0140447927
- Pages: 732 pages