Idiot

<b>The most autobiographical novel by the author of <i>Crime and Punishment </i>and <i>The Brothers Karamazov--</i>and the namesake of Elif Batuman's debut novel <i>The Idiot</i></b> <p/> Returning to St Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium the gentle and naïve epileptic Prince Myshkin-- known as the idiot--pays a visit to his distant relative General Yepanchin and proceeds to charm the General and his family. But his life is thrown into turmoil when he chances on a photograph of the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna. Utterly infatuated he soon finds himself caught up in a love triangle and drawn into a web of blackmail betrayal and finally murder. In Prince Myshkin Dostoyevsky portrays the purity of a truly beautiful soul and explores the perils that innocence and goodness face in a corrupt world. <p/> 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.