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Published1874
Pages622
Open Library4.2 / 5
Club average—

Excerpt

Inspired by an image of Christ's suffering, Fyodor Dostoyevsky set out to portray "a truly beautiful soul" colliding with the brutal reality of contemporary society. Returning to St. Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, the gentle and naive Prince Myshkin—known as "the idiot"—pays a visit to his distant relative General Yepanchin and proceeds to charm the General and his circle. But after becoming infatuated with the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna, Myshkin finds himself caught up in a love triangle and drawn into a web of blackmail, betrayal, and, ultimately, murder. This new translation by David McDuff is sensitive to the shifting registers of the original Russian, capturing the nervous, elliptic flow of the narrative for a new generation of readers.

Literary origin

Country whose literature this title belongs to, based on author tradition —not necessarily where the story is set.

  • Russia

Topics from Open Library

Subjects

  • Notebooks, sketchbooks
  • Fiction, general
  • Russia in fiction
  • Fiction
  • Social conditions
  • Social life and customs
  • Russian fiction
  • Translations into English
  • Russia
  • Classic Literature

Times & places

  • 1801-1917
  • 1533-1917
  • 19th century
Added to BBRC

Oct 4, 2026

Catalog slug

idiot

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