Dostoyevsky's great novel of suffering and sickness, innocence and greed

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, 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

• We started tracking this book on November 3, 2011.
• This book was £0.99 when we started tracking it.
• The price of this book has changed 36 times in the past 5,229 days.
• The current price of this book is £2.99 last checked 6 hours ago.
• This book is at its lowest price in the past 90 days.
• This lowest price this book has been offered at in the past year is £0.99.
• The lowest price to date was £0.99 last reached on September 18, 2025.
• This book has been £0.99 2 times since we started tracking it.
• The highest price to date was £7.49 last reached on December 19, 2011.
• This book has been £7.49 one time since we started tracking it.

• Literature & FictionClassicsHistorical
• Literature & FictionClassicsRomance

• Publication Date: May 27, 2004
• Text-to-Speech: Disabled
• Lending: Disabled
• Print Length: 788 Pages
• File Size: 30 KB