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. In Petersburg the prince finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with money, power, and manipulation. A short first novel, Poor Folk (1846) brought him instant success, but his writing career was cut short by his arrest for alleged subversion against Tsar Nicholas I in 1849. 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. Fyodor Mikailovich Dostoevsky’s life was as dark and dramatic as the great novels he wrote. 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.Īfter 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 Idiot Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonskys masterful translation of The Idiot is destined to stand with their versions of Crime and Punishment.
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