The Idiot: A New Translation

A definitive new rendering of Dostoevsky’s most enigmatic and deeply felt work.

A haunting parable of innocence undone, The Idiot stands as Dostoevsky’s most personal—and most disquieting—novel. It follows the gentle and guileless Prince Myshkin, recently returned to St. Petersburg from treatment in a Swiss sanatorium, whose radical honesty and spiritual clarity set him fatally at odds with the vanities and cruelties of Russian high society. His presence unravels a web of greed, desire, and wounded pride as he becomes entangled with the beautiful, self-destructive Nastasya Filippovna and the tormented Rogozhin. Can goodness persist in a world built on deceit? Or does purity, in such a world, become its own kind of delusion?

In this vibrant new translation, Michael R. Katz reveals the raw intensity of Dostoevsky’s vision, accentuating the novel’s dark ironies and turbulent rhythms and preserving the jagged emotional force of the original. This is the most faithful and compelling version yet of a masterpiece that still unsettles and still astonishes.