The Idiot (Vintage Classics)

The Idiot (Vintage Classics)

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky's masterful translation of <b>The Idiot</b> is destined to stand with their versions of <b>Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov</b><i>, </i>and <b>Demons</b> as the definitive Dostoevsky in English.<br><br>After his great portrayal of a guilty man in <b>Crime and Punishment</b><i>,</i> Dostoevsky set out in <b>The Idiot</b> to portray a man of pure innocence. 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. 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.