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The Idiot

By Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Penguin Classics
Series: Penguin Clothbound Classics
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Brief Description
Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot is an immaculate portrait of innocence tainted by the brutal reality of human greed. This Penguin Classics edition is translated from the Russian by David McDuff, with an introduction by William Mills Todd III. Returning to St Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium,... Read More
Format: Hardback
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Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Idiot is an immaculate portrait of innocence tainted by the brutal reality of human greed. This Penguin Classics edition is translated from the Russian by David McDuff, with an introduction by William Mills Todd III.

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. 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, offering a fascinating examination of the pressures on Dostoyevsky as he wrote the story of his Christ-like hero.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) was born in Moscow. From 1849-54, he lived in a convict prison, and in later years, his passion for gambling led him deeply into debt. His other works available in Penguin Classics include Crime & Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Demons.

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

Series: Penguin Clothbound Classics

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Book Details

INFORMATION

ISBN: 9780241739822

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

Format: Hardback

Date Published: 11 September 2025

Country: United Kingdom

Imprint: Penguin Classics

Audience: General / adult

DIMENSIONS

Spine width: 40.0mm

Width: 132.0mm

Height: 204.0mm

Weight: 750g

Pages: 784

Collections

Best Sellers at Book Hero Classic Fiction Classic General Fiction Fiction Fyodor Dostoyevsky General Fiction In Stock Books In-Stock Fiction Books Literary Fiction New Release Fiction Penguin Books Penguin Classics Penguin Classics: General Fiction Series: Penguin Clothbound Classics

About the Author

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow in 1821. His debut, the epistolary novella Poor Folk (1846), made his name. In 1849 he was arrested for involvement with the politically subversive 'Petrashevsky circle' and until 1854 he lived in a convict prison in Omsk, Siberia. From this experience came The House of the Dead (1860-2). In 1860 he began the journal Vremya (Time). Already married, he fell in love with one of his contributors, Appollinaria Suslova, eighteen years his junior, and developed a ruinous passion for roulette. After the death of his first wife, Maria, in 1864, Dostoyevsky completed Notes from Underground and began work towards Crime and Punishment (1866). The major novels of his late period are The Idiot (1868), Demons (1871-2) and The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80). He died in 1881.

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