The Idiot

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky

eBook - 2012

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic tale of one man’s pure innocence in the face of a society obsessed with power, money, and manipulationThe 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’s masterful translation of The Idiot is destined to stand with... more