Der Idiot

Hardcover, 842 pages

German language

Published Jan. 1, 1996 by Artemis & Winkler.

ISBN:
978-3-538-06630-4
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OCLC Number:
75230030

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4 stars (19 reviews)

Inspired by an image of Christ's suffering, Fyodor Dostoyevsky set out to portray "a truly beautiful soul" colliding with the brutal reality of contemporary society. Returning to St. Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, the gentle and naive Prince Myshkin—known as "the idiot"—pays a visit to his distant relative General Yepanchin and proceeds to charm the General and his circle. But after becoming infatuated with the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna, Myshkin finds himself caught up in a love triangle and drawn into a web of blackmail, betrayal, and, ultimately, murder. This new translation by David McDuff is sensitive to the shifting registers of the original Russian, capturing the nervous, elliptic flow of the narrative for a new generation of readers.

89 editions

Review of 'Der Idiot' on 'Storygraph'

4 stars

It certainly takes some effort to get through this book, but it's worth it. Nothing much seems to happen and some parts are quite tedious (e.g. some of the long speeches), but in the end, I found I wanted to read through to see what would happen to the prince and the other characters next.

However, the story did sometimes get confusing due to the large array of characters that are frequently called by different names (according to the Slavic customs) and the quite archaic English translation (I was certainly happy with the built-in dictionary of my e-reader).

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