The Idiot FROM THE PUBLISHER
Returning to Russia from a sanitarium in Switzerland, the Christ-like epileptic Prince Myshkin finds himself enmeshed in a tangle of love, torn between two women - the notorious kept woman Nastasya and the pure Aglaia - both involved, in turn, with the corrupt, money-hungry Ganya. In the end, Myshkin's honesty, goodness, and integrity are shown to be unequal to the moral emptiness of those around him. In her revision of the Garnett translation, Anna Brailovsky has corrected inaccuracies wrought by Garnett's drastic anglicization of the novel, restoring as much as possible the syntactical structure of the original.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, justly acclaimed for their translations of such Russian classics as Gogol's Dead Souls and Dostoyevski's The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground, have now undertaken another major Dostoyevski novel, The Idiot. Their trademark style fresh, crisp and faithful to the original (bumps and blemishes included) brings the story of nave, truth-telling Prince Myshkin to new life. As is true of their other translations of Dostoyevski, this will likely be the definitive edition for years to come. Intro. by Pevear. (May) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
AudioFile - Don Wismer
Writing with sweeping grandeur of the pre-Soviet era, Dostoyevsky describes an elite society swarming with eccentrics. Some are idiots. Many are caught in a sea of emotion and might as well be idiots. Michael Sheen, a young British actor, reads with absolute control of voice, characters and unfamiliar Russian names. Each character is sharply delineated by inflection, tone, pacing, tension. Even the women are nicely drawn, though in this tight abridgment itﾽs sometimes hard to distinguish among the minor ones. When hysteria is called for, Sheen delivers it, not loudly, but with subdued intensity. Naxos punctuates the text with a selection of appropriate classical music, mostly somber, sometimes grand. D.W. ﾽAudioFile, Portland, Maine
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