{"product_id":"the-idiot-isbn-9780375413926","title":"The Idiot","description":"\u003cb\u003eRichard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s masterful translation of \u003ci\u003eThe Idiot\u003c\/i\u003e is destined to stand with their versions of \u003ci\u003eCrime and Punishment\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Brothers Karamazov, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eDemons\u003c\/i\u003e as the definitive Dostoevsky in English.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAfter his great portrayal of a guilty man in \u003ci\u003eCrime and Punishment,\u003c\/i\u003e Dostoevsky set out in \u003ci\u003eThe Idiot\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEveryman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Everyman’s Library Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.Praise for previous translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, winners of the PEN\/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe Brothers Karamazov\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“One finally gets the musical whole of Dostoevsky’s original.” —\u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“It may well be that Dostoevsky’s [world], with all its resourceful energies of life and language, is only now–and through the medium of [this] new translation–beginning to come home to the English-speaking reader.” —\u003ci\u003eNew York Review of Books \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eCrime and Punishment\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“The best [translation] currently available.... An especially faithful re-creation...with a coiled-spring kinetic energy.... Don’t miss it.” —\u003ci\u003eWashington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“This fresh, new translation...provides a more exact, idiomatic, and contemporary rendition of the novel that brings Fyodor Dostoevsky’s tale achingly alive.... It succeeds beautifully.” —\u003ci\u003eSan Francisco Chronicle\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Reaches as close to Dostoevsky’s Russian as is possible in English....The original’s force and frightening immediacy is captured....The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation will become the standard version.” —\u003ci\u003eChicago Tribune \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eDemons\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“The merit in this edition of Demons resides in the technical virtuosity of the translators....They capture the feverishly intense, personal explosions of activity and emotion that manifest themselves in Russian life.” —\u003ci\u003eNew York Times Book Review \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“[Pevear and Volokhonsky] have managed to capture and differentiate the characters’ many voices....They come into their own when faced with Dostoevsky’s wonderfully quirky use of varied speech patterns.... A capital job of restoration.” —\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003eFYODOR MIKAILOVICH DOSTEOVSKY’S life was as dark and dramatic as the great novels he wrote. He was born in Moscow in 1821. A short first novel, \u003ci\u003ePoor Folk \u003c\/i\u003e(1846) brought him instant success, but his writing career was cut short by his arrest for alleged subversion against Tsar Nicholas I in 1849. In prison he was given the “silent treatment” for eight months (guards even wore velvet soled boots) before he was led in front a firing squad. Dressed in a death shroud, he faced an open grave and awaited execution, when suddenly, an order arrived commuting his sentence. He then spent four years at hard labor in a Siberian prison, where he began to suffer from epilepsy, and he returned to St. Petersburg only a full ten years after he had left in chains.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHis prison experiences coupled with his conversion to a profoundly religious philosophy formed the basis for his great novels. But it was his fortuitous marriage to Anna Snitkina, following a period of utter destitution brought about by his compulsive gambling, that gave Dostoevsky the emotional stability to complete \u003ci\u003eCrime and Punishment \u003c\/i\u003e(1866), \u003ci\u003eThe Idiot\u003c\/i\u003e (1868–69),\u003ci\u003e The Possessed \u003c\/i\u003e(1871–72), and \u003ci\u003eThe Brothers Karamazov \u003c\/i\u003e(1879–80). When Dostoevsky died in 1881, he left a legacy of masterworks that influenced the great thinkers and writers of the Western world and immortalized him as a giant among writers of world literature.\u003cb\u003eI \u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In late November, during a thaw, around nine in the morning, a train on the Petersburg– Warsaw railway line was approaching Petersburg at full blast. It was so damp and  foggy that it had just barely grown light; within ten paces to the right and left  of the rails, it was difficult to make out anything at all from the carriage windows.  Among the passengers were some returning from abroad; but the third-class compartments  were more crowded, mainly with common folk on business, from not too far away. As  usual, everyone was tired, everyone’s eyes had grown heavy in the night, everyone  was chilled, all the faces were pale and yellow, matching the color of the fog.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In one of the third-class carriages, right by the window, two passengers had, from  early dawn, been sitting facing one another—both were young people, both traveled  light, both were unfashionably dressed, both had rather remarkable faces, and both  expressed, at last, a desire to start a conversation. If they had both known, one  about the other, in what way they were especially remarkable in that moment, they  would naturally have wondered that chance had so strangely placed them face to face  in a third-class carriage of the Warsaw–Petersburg train. One of them was a short  man about twenty-seven, with almost black curly hair and small but fiery gray eyes.  His nose was broad and flat, his cheekbones high; his thin lips continually curved  into a sort of insolent, mocking and even malicious smile; but the high and well-shaped  forehead redeemed the ignoble lines of the lower part of the face. What was particularly  striking about the young man’s face was its deathly pallor, which lent him an exhausted  look in spite of his fairly sturdy build, and at the same time something passionate  to the point of suffering, which did not harmonize with his insolent and coarse smile  and his sharp and self-satisfied gaze. He was warmly dressed in a full, black, sheepskin-lined  overcoat, and had not felt the cold at night, while his neighbor had been forced  to endure all the pleasures of a damp Russian November night, for which he was evidently  unprepared. He had a fairly thick and wide cloak with no sleeves and a huge hood,  just like those frequently used by travelers in winter somewhere far abroad, in Switzerland  or, for instance, Northern Italy, who do not reckon, of course, on such distances  along the journey as from Eydtkuhnen1 to Petersburg. But what was entirely suitable  and satisfactory in Italy turned out to be not quite fitting for Russia. The owner  of the hooded cloak was a young man, also twenty-six or twenty-seven years old, somewhat  above the average in height, with very fair thick hair, with sunken cheeks and a  thin, pointed, almost white beard. His eyes were large, blue and intent; there was  something calm, though somber, in their expression, something full of that strange  look by which some can surmise epilepsy in a person at first glance. The young man’ s face was otherwise pleasing, delicate and lean, though colorless, and at this moment  even blue with cold. From his hands dangled a meager bundle tied up in an old, faded  raw-silk kerchief, which, it seemed, contained the entirety of his traveling effects.  He wore thick-soled boots and spats—it was all very un-Russian. His dark-haired neighbor  in the sheepskin observed all this, partly from having nothing to do, and at last,  with that indelicate smile in which satisfaction at the misfortunes of others is  sometimes so unceremoniously and casually expressed, he asked:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Chilly?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e And he  shuddered.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Very,” answered his neighbor, with extraordinary readiness, “and just  think, it’s thawing, too. What if there were a frost? I didn’t even think it would  be so cold at home. I’ve become unused to it.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “From abroad, eh?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Yes, from Switzerland.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Phew! You don’t say!” The dark-haired man whistled and burst into laughter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e They  struck up a conversation. The readiness of the fair young man in the Swiss cloak  to answer all his swarthy companion’s inquiries was astonishing and without the merest  suspicion of the absolute thoughtlessness, inappropriateness and idleness of some  of the questions. In answering, he declared by the by that he had indeed not been  in Russia for a long time, a little over four years, that he had been sent abroad  on account of an illness, some kind of strange nervous illness, like epilepsy or  St. Vitus’s dance, resulting in trembling fits and convulsions. The swarthy man chuckled  several times as he listened; and he laughed particularly when, in answer to his  inquiry, “Well, have they cured you?” the fair one answered, “No, they haven’t.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Ha! You must have wasted a lot of money over it, and we believe in them over here,”  the swarthy man observed sarcastically.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “That’s the honest truth!” interposed a  badly dressed gentleman sitting beside them, a petty official type, set in his crusty  scrivener’s ways, about forty, powerfully built, with a red nose and pimpled face—“That’ s the honest truth, sir, they only absorb all the resources of Russia for nothing!” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Oh, you are quite mistaken in my case!” the patient from Switzerland chimed in  with a gentle and conciliatory voice. “Of course, I can’t argue with you because  I don’t know all about it, but my doctor even shared his last penny with me for the  journey here; and there, he supported me at his expense for nearly two years.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Why,  had you no one to pay for you?” asked the swarthy man.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “No; Mr. Pavlishchev, who  used to pay for me there, died two years ago. I’ve since written to Generaless Epanchin,  a distant relation of mine, but I’ve had no answer. So I’ve come . . .”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Where are  you going then?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “You mean, where am I going to stay? . . . I don’t rightly know  yet . . . Somewhere . . .”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “You’ve not made up your mind yet?” And both his listeners  burst out laughing again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “And no doubt that bundle is all you’ve got in the world?”  asked the swarthy man.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “I’m willing to bet on it,” chimed in the red-nosed official  with an exceptionally gleeful air, “and that he’s got nothing else in the luggage  van, though poverty is no vice, which, again, one mustn’t neglect to note.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It turned  out that this was the case, too; the fair-haired young man acknowledged it at once  with extraordinary readiness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Your bundle has some value, anyway,” the petty official  went on, when they had laughed to their heart’s content (remarkably, the owner of  the bundle finally began to laugh himself, looking at them, which increased their  mirth), “and though you could stake your head that it contains no golden rolls of  foreign coin with Napoleons or Friedrichs, to say nothing of Dutch Arapchicks, which  may already be concluded merely from the spats covering those foreign boots of yours,  yet . . . when we add to your bundle such a purported relation as, for ex- ample,  Generaless Epanchin, then even the bundle takes on a certain different significance,  needless to say, but only in the case that Generaless Epanchin is really your relation  and you are not mistaken, out of absentmindedness . . . which a person is very, very  wont to do, if only . . . from an excess of imagination.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Ah, you’ve guessed right  again,” the fair young man chimed in. “It really is almost a mistake, that’s to say,  she is almost no relation; so much so that I really was not at all surprised back  then, when I got no answer there. It was what I expected.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “You simply wasted the  money for the postage. Hm! . . . Anyway, you are open-hearted and sincere, which  is commendable. Hm! . . . As for General Epanchin, we know him, yes sir, for, actually,  he is a man everyone knows; and I used to know the late Mr. Pavlishchev, too, who  paid your expenses in Switzerland, that is if it was Nikolai Andreevich Pavlishchev,  for there were two of them, cousins. The other lives in the Crimea. The late Nikolai  Andreevich was a worthy man and well connected, and he’d four thousand serfs in his  day . . .”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Just so, Nikolai Andreevich Pavlishchev was his name.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e And having answered,  the young man intently and searchingly scrutinized the know-it-all gentleman. One  encounters these know-it-all gentlemen sometimes, even fairly often, in a certain  well-known social sphere. They know everything. All the restless curiosity and faculties  of their mind are irresistibly bent in one direction, no doubt from lack of more  important ideas and interests in life, as the contemporary thinker would put it.  The phrase “they know everything,” by the way, must be taken to apply to a rather  limited sphere: where so-and- so serves, with whom he is acquainted, the amount of  his net worth, where he was governor, to whom he’s married, how much his wife brought  in, who are his cousins, who twice removed, etc., etc., and so on in that vein. For  the most part, these know-it-alls walk about with worn-out elbows and receive a salary  of seventeen rubles a month. The people of whose lives they know every last detail  would be at a loss to imagine their motives. Yet, in the meantime many of them are  positively consoled by this knowledge, which amounts to a complete science, and derive  from it self-respect and even their highest spiritual gratification. And indeed it  is a fascinating science. I have seen learned men, literary men, poets, politicians,  who sought and found in that very science their greatest worldly comforts and goals,  indeed, positively making their careers solely on that account. Throughout this entire  conversation the swarthy young man had been yawning, looking aimlessly out of the  window and impatiently expecting the end of the journey. He was somehow preoccupied,  extremely preoccupied, almost agitated; he was even becoming somewhat strange: at  times he would both hear and not hear, look and not look, laugh and not know or understand  what he was laughing at.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Excuse me, whom have I the honor . . .” the pimply gentleman  said suddenly, addressing the fair young man with the bundle.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Prince Lev Nikolaevich  Myshkin,” replied the latter with prompt and unhesitating readiness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Prince Myshkin?  Lev Nikolaevich? Don’t know . . . Can’t say I’ve ever heard . . .” the official responded  thoughtfully. “I don’t mean the\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e name, that is, it’s a historical name, it’s to be  found in Karamzin’s History, as it should be; I mean you personally, and indeed there  are no\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Prince Myshkins to be met with anywhere, one never hears of them anymore.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “I should think not,” the prince answered at once, “there are no Prince Myshkins  now except me; I believe I am the last of them. And as for our fathers and grandfathers,  some of them had even been odnodvortsy. My father, by the way, was a sublieutenant  in the army, of the Junkers. But I don’t in fact know how Generaless Epanchin also  wound up being of the Myshkins, also the last in her line . . .”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “He-he-he! The  last in her line! He-he! What a phrase you turn,” giggled the official.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The swarthy  man smirked, too. The fair man was rather surprised that he had managed to make a  pun, and a pretty bad one at that.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Imagine, I said it without thinking,” he explained  at last, wondering.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “To be sure, to be sure you did,” the official assented good-humoredly.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “So then, Prince, and you’ve been studying the sciences out there too, with the  professor, have you?” asked the swarthy man suddenly.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Yes . . . I was studying.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “For my part, I’ve never studied anything.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Well, I only did a little, you know,”  added the prince almost apologetically. “It wasn’t possible to teach me systematically,  because of my illness.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Do you know the Rogozhins?” the swarthy man asked quickly.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “No, I don’t know them at all. I know very few people in Russia. You’re a Rogozhin,  then?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Yes, my name is Rogozhin, Parfyon.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Parfyon? That wouldn’t be of those  same Rogozhins . . .” the official began, with increased gravity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Yes, one of those,  one of the same,” interrupted the swarthy man quickly and with uncivil impatience.  And indeed, he hadn’t addressed the pimply official even once, but from the very  start had spoken only to the prince.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “But . . . how is that?” The official froze  with amazement and his eyes nearly popped out of his head, his whole face immediately  beginning to assume a reverent and servile, almost frightened, expression. “Related  to the same Semyon Parfyonovich Rogozhin, Hereditary Honorable Citizen, what passed  on a month since and left two and a half million in capital?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “And how do you know  he left a clear two and a half million?” the swarthy man interrupted, not deigning  to glance toward the official now, either. “Just look! (he indicated him to the prince  with a wink), and what do they possibly gain by sucking up to you at once? But it’ s true that my father has died, and as for me, a month later, I’m going home from  Pskov practically barefoot. Neither my brother, that scoundrel, nor my mother have  sent either money or word—I was sent nothing! Like a dog! I’ve spent the entire month  lying in a fever in Pskov! . . .”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “And now you are coming in for a tidy million,  at the lowest reckoning, oh Lord!” the official flung up his hands.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “What is it  to him, tell me that?” said Rogozhin, nodding irritably and angrily toward him again.  “Why, I am not going to give you a farthing of it, though you may walk on your hands  before me, if you like.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “I will, I will.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “You see! But I won’t give you anything,  I won’t, if you dance for a whole week.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Well, don’t! And I don’t need it. Don’ t! But I shall dance. I shall leave my wife and children and dance before you. Only  to flatter! To flatter!”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Fie on you!” spat the swarthy man. “Five weeks ago, like  you”—he addressed the prince—“with nothing but a bundle, I ran away from my father  to Pskov, to my aunt; and there collapsed with fever, while he went and died without  me. Kicked the bucket. Eternal memory to the deceased, but he almost killed me then!  Would you believe it, Prince, yes, by God! Had I not run away then, he would have  killed me on the spot.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Did you do something to make him angry?” countered the  prince, examining the millionaire in the sheepskin with some particular interest.  But though there may have been something intrinsically remarkable in the million  and in receiving a legacy, the prince was surprised and interested by something else  as well; and Rogozhin himself was for some reason especially keen to converse with  the prince, though it seemed he was in need of conversation in a more mechanical  than spiritual sense; rather more from preoccupation than frankness; from agitation  and disquiet, for the sake of just looking at someone and prattling on about something.  It seemed that he was still in a feverish state, and at the very least suffering  from the chills. As for the official, well, he simply hovered over Rogozhin, didn’ t dare to breathe, hung on every word and weighed it, precisely as if looking for  a diamond.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Angry he certainly was, and perhaps with reason,” answered Rogozhin,  “but more than anything, my brother did me in. Nothing can be said against my mother,  she’s an old woman, reads the Lives of the Saints, sits with the crones, and whatever  brother Senjka9 resolves, so it shall be done. And why didn’t he send word to me  at the time, then? It’s clear, sir! It’s true I was unconscious at the time. They  say a telegram was sent, too. But you just see if a telegram can get to my aunt.  She’s widowed going on thirty years now and keeps sitting with the holy fools from  morning till night. A nun she isn’t, but even worse. Well, the telegram gave her  a fright, and without opening it, she went and presented it at the constable’s station,  where it still lies to this day. Only Konyov, Vassily Vassilielich, came to my rescue,  wrote me all about it. At night my brother cut off the solid gold tassels from the  brocaded pall on my father’s coffin. ‘Think what a lot of money they are worth,’  he apparently said. Well, for that alone he can go to Siberia, if I like, for this  is sacrilege. Hey there, you clown,” he turned to the official, “what’s the law say:  is it sacrilege?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Sacrilege! Sacrilege!” the official at once concurred.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Do they  send you to Siberia for it?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “To Siberia, to Siberia. At once to Siberia!”","brand":"Everyman's Library","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46301127770341,"sku":"NP9780375413926","price":34.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375413926.jpg?v=1767739901","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-idiot-isbn-9780375413926","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}