Synopses & Reviews
From the award-winning translators of
The Brothers Karamazov, a superb new translation of the novel in which Dostoevsky set out to portray "a truly beautiful soul."
In The Idiot, Prince Myshkin, a saintly man, is thrust into the heart of a society obsessed with wealth, power, and sexual conquest. He soon finds himself at the center of a violent love triangle in which a notorious woman and a beautiful young girl become rivals for his affections. Extortion, scandal, and murder follow, as Dostoevsky's "positively good man" clashes with the emptiness of a society that cannot accommodate his moral idealism.
This wonderfully fresh and faithful translation—never before published—is sure to become the definitive edition in English.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Review
"Nothing is outside Dostoevsky's province....Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading." Virginia Woolf
About the Author
Anna Brailovsky is a translator and candidate for a Ph.D. in art history at Johns Hopkins University.
Joseph Frank is Professor Emeritus of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. The first volume of his definitive biography, Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859, won the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.