《Idiot》

Book Description The Wordsworth Classics covers a huge list of beloved works of literature in English and translations. This growing series is rigorously updated, with scholarly introductions and notes added to new titles. Prince Myshkin returns to Russia from an asylum in Switzerland. Embroiled in the intrigues which centre around the ruling classes, he emerges as a combination of the Christian ideal and Dostoevsky's own views. The world created by the ruling classes cannot accommodate the goodness of this idiot. From 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. From AudioFile 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 it's 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. About Author Anna Brailovsky is a translator and candidate for a Ph.D. in art history at Johns Hopkins University. Joseph Frank is Professor Emeritus of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. The first volume of his definitive biography, Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, 1850–1859, won the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. Book Dimension : length: (cm)19.8 　　　 　　　　　 　　　　　 width:(cm)12.6