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.
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Prince Myshkin arrives to St. Petersburg as a naive, full of life fellow. It turns out that he is quite unable to survive in the high society of the Russian metropole. The first day of the book is the most enjoyable to read. The book unfolds in the one day described so that the prince already is a complex love relationship with Nastasya Filipovna by the end of the very first day he is staying in St.Petersburg. Then Myshkin falls in love with another woman, Aglaya Yepanchina. She is a daughter of a distant relative of prince Myshkin. Eventually the story takes twists and turns that are quite a torment to read.
It is widely perceived that Dostoyevsky used many elements of his own life in creating the characters for this story. (F.e he had a lover that quite resembled the character of Nastasya filipovna.) Such notions always make a book more interesting to read.
The middle part of the book is quite philosophical and promoting russian patriotism and deep religiousness, themes that Dostoyevsky likes to discuss. Towards the end I was in pain to see how prince Myshkin was shattered slowly but surely into bits and pieces, perhaps suggesting that true virtue does not survive in the real world.
