Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s masterful translation of
The Idiot
is destined to stand with their versions of
Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov
,
and
Demons
as the definitive Dostoevsky in English.
After his great portrayal of a guilty man in
Crime and Punishment
Dostoevsky set out in
to portray a man of pure innocence. The twenty-six-year-old Prince Myshkin, following a stay of several years in a Swiss sanatorium, returns to Russia to collect an inheritance and “be among people.” Even before he reaches home he meets the dark Rogozhin, a rich merchant’s son whose obsession with the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna eventually draws all three of them into a tragic denouement. In Petersburg the prince finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with money, power, and manipulation. Scandal escalates to murder as Dostoevsky traces the surprising effect of this “positively beautiful man” on the people around him, leading to a final scene that is one of the most powerful in all of world literature.