Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Idiot
1916 · 636 pages
- Author
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Edition
- A novel in four parts, translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett; The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, volume II
- Published
- New York, The Macmillan Company, 1916
- Pages
- 636
- File
- DjVu, 24.6 MB
- Text search
- yes
- Rights
- public domain
Reading on an iPhone or iPad?
4.2 on the App Store4.2 · Read offline, with bookmarks and Read Aloud.
About the book
The Idiot is Dostoevsky’s attempt, in his own words, to portray a truly good man. He wrote it while living abroad with his young wife, mostly in Switzerland and Italy, and it was serialised in The Russian Messenger in 1868 and 1869.
Prince Lev Myshkin, gentle, trusting and epileptic, returns to St Petersburg after years of treatment in a Swiss sanatorium. Within a day he is caught up with the general’s family of the Yepanchins, the passionate merchant’s son Rogozhin and the proud, wounded beauty Nastasya Filippovna, whom both men love. His honesty and compassion make people laugh at him and open up to him at the same time, yet they cannot prevent the tragedy that his presence seems to hasten.
Constance Garnett’s translation appeared in 1913 as the second volume of her series of Dostoevsky’s novels and introduced the book to a wide English-speaking readership.
Contents
Tap a chapter to open the book there.
About this edition
Constance Garnett’s translation as published in New York by the Macmillan Company in 1916, as volume II of The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky; the sheets were printed in Great Britain by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co. at the Ballantyne Press. A list of the other volumes in the series faces the title page. The text runs to 620 pages in four parts without a contents list. The scan has a text layer.
How to read it
- The book opens right in your browser, on a phone or a computer: nothing to install, no sign-up.
- Search works across the whole book.
- In the reader you can jump between chapters, zoom, switch to a night page and save the book as a PDF.
Source
A scan from the Wikimedia Foundation's open projects. The book is in the public domain: free to read, download and share.