The most autobiographical novel by the author ofCrimeand PunishmentandThe Brothers Karamazovand the namesakeof Elif Batumans debut novel,The Idiot

Returning to St Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, the gentle and naveepileptic Prince Myshkin known as the idiotpays a visit to his distantrelative 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 thebeautiful Nastasya Filippovna. Utterly infatuated, he soon finds himself caughtup in a love triangle and drawn into a web of blackmail, betrayal, and finally,murder. In Prince Myshkin, Dostoyevsky portrays the purity of a trulybeautiful soul and explores the perils that innocence and goodness face in acorrupt world.

David McDuff’s translation brilliantly captures the novel’s idiosyncratic anddream-like language and the nervous, elliptic flow of the narrative. Thisedition also contains an introduction by William Mills Todd III, which is afascinating examination of the pressures on Dostoyevsky as he wrote the storyof his Christ-like hero.

About the Author

Fyodor Dostoyevsky(18211881) was a Russiannovelist, journalist, and short-story writer whose novelsCrime andPunishmentandThe Brothers Karamazovrank among thegreatest of the nineteenth century.

David McDuff(translator) has translated many works ofnineteenth-century Russian literature, including works by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy,and Leskov for Penguin Classics.

William Mills Todd III(introducer) is a professor of Slaviclanguages at Harvard.