He graduated from the St Petersburg Academy of Military Engineering in 1846 but decided to change careers and become a writer. He had six siblings and his mother died in 1837 and his father in 1839. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury Read more Detailsįyodor Dostoevsky was born in Moscow on 11th November 1821. 6 and Other Stories, also available in Penguin Classics. If you enjoyed The Idiot, you might like Anton Chekhov's Ward No. His other works available in Penguin Classics include Crime & Punishment, The Idiot and Demons.
From 1849-54 he lived in a convict prison, and in later years his passion for gambling led him deeply into debt.
This edition also contains a new 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.įyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) was born in Moscow. Inspired by an image of Christ's suffering Dostoyevsky sought to portray in Prince Myshkin the purity of a 'truly beautiful soul' and explore the perils that innocence and goodness face in a corrupt world.ĭavid McDuff's new translation brilliantly captures the novel's idiosyncratic and dream-like language and the nervous, elliptic flow of the narrative. Utterly infatuated with her, he soon finds himself caught up in a love triangle and drawn into a web of blackmail, betrayal, and finally, murder. But his life is thrown into turmoil when he chances on a photograph of the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna. Returning to St Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, the gentle and naïve epileptic Prince Myshkin - the titular 'idiot' - pays a visit to his distant relative General Yepanchin and proceeds to charm the General, his wife, and his three daughters.
This Penguin Classics edition is translated from the Russian by David McDuff, with an introduction by William Mills Todd III. Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot is an immaculate portrait of innocence tainted by the brutal reality of human greed.
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