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Publisher: Simon & Brown
Published: Dec 1969
Genre: Fiction - Literary
Pages: 846
The most autobiographical novel by the author of Crime and Punishmentand The Brothers Karamazov—and the namesake of Elif Batuman’s debut novel, The Idiot\r\n \r\n Returning to St Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, the gentle and naïve epileptic Prince Myshkin— known as the “idiot”—pays a visit to his distant relative General Yepanchin and proceeds to charm the General and his family. But his life is thrown into turmoil when he chances on a photograph of the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna. Utterly infatuated, he soon finds himself caught up in a love triangle and drawn into a web of blackmail, betrayal, and finally, murder. In Prince Myshkin, Dostoyevsky portrays the purity of “a truly beautiful soul” and explores the perils that innocence and goodness face in a corrupt world. \r\n \r\n David McDuff\'s translation brilliantly captures the novel\'s idiosyncratic and dream-like language and the nervous, elliptic flow of the narrative. This edition also contains an introduction by William Mills Todd III, which is a fascinating examination of the pressures on Dostoyevsky as he wrote the story of his Christ-like hero.