Dostoyevsky s great novel of suffering and sickness, innocence and greed, now in Penguin Clothbound Classics Returning to St Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, the gentle and naive 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. But his life is thrown into turmoil when he chances on a photograph of the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna. 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. 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. David McDuff s translation brilliantly captures the novel s idiosyncratic and dream-like language and the nervous, elliptic flow of the narrative. This edition also contains an 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. If you enjoyed The Idiot, you might like Anton Chekhov s Ward No. 6 and Other Stories, also available in Penguin Classics. McDuff s language is rich and alive The New York Times Book Review [The Idiot s] ... narrative is so compelling Rowan Williams
