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Идиот

1874

  • notebooks, sketchbooks
  • fiction, general
  • russia in fiction
  • fiction
  • social conditions
  • social life and customs
  • russian fiction
  • translations into english
  • russia
  • classic literature

The story

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.

What it’s like

Feverish, talky prose tumbles through overheated drawing rooms and dusty summer streets, its sentences doubling back on themselves while voices slide from sarcasm into confession and sudden tenderness within a single scene. The atmosphere is humid Petersburg heat, lamplit evenings, and crowded apartments full of guests, with brief bright breaks in Swiss mountain air that feel like a held breath. The rhythm is restless and elliptic: long, heated dialogues in close rooms alternate with quieter, brooding stretches, and the tone swings between childlike warmth and a creeping, sweaty dread. The emotional register is intense and morally anxious, following a gentle, bewildered man who is slowly pulled into the jealousy and humiliation of people who cannot leave one another alone. Intensity: some violence, including a late, abrupt death that shocks rather than gorges; much emotional cruelty and humiliation; frequent feverish talk of despair and self-destruction; sexual content only by suggestion. For readers who love immersive, big-hearted Russian classics, long argumentative scenes, and characters whose goodness is painful to watch.

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