Book Description

This premium quality large print edition contains the complete and unabridged original classic version of The Idiot, printed on heavyweight, bright white paper in a large 7.44"x9.69" format, with a fully laminated full-color cover featuring an original design. Also included is authoritative introductory commentary discussing the life and work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and The Idiot in particular, providing the modern reader with useful background information to enhance the enjoyment of this classic novel. "The Idiot" is Prince Lev Nikolaievich Myshkin, returning to Russia after a long stay at a Swiss sanitorium. Prone to blackouts and learning difficulties as a youth, he has been treated with some success, but the society of St. Petersburg scorns him, viewing as idiocy his simple honesty, trustful nature and naiveté. Finding himself at the center of an increasingly complex entanglement involving a beautiful kept woman and a virtuous and pretty young girl, both of whom win his affection, and the men who love - or desire - them, Myshkin's unfettered goodness precipitates a tragic chain of events with disastrous consequences. Beginning with the chance meeting of Myshkin, light-haired, blue-eyed, affable and unassuming and the dark and intense Rogozhin on the train to St. Petersburg, "The Idiot" is a study in contrasts, exploring themes of good and evil, honesty and deceit, passion and self-control, through the story of Myshkin, "a positively good man," thrust into a society which espouses as values the very qualities which it derides as "idiocy," and questioning whether human society has a place for the true and unflinching honesty and trust of a saintly man. Complex and dense with rich characters and evocative questions about human nature and society, ranked among the finest of Dostoyevsky's works, "The Idiot" is often considered one of the most brilliant literary achievements of the Golden Age of Russian literature. Like Dickens in England, Dostoyevsky was embraced by the masses about whom he wrote and to whom he spoke, despite criticism by contemporary "experts" who found his subject matter unsuitable for "literature" and his work lacking in style and technical merit. And like Dickens, Dostoyevsky has become an inextricable part of the culture of his country and the essential literature of the world.