The Idiot.

[DOSTOEVSKY, Fyodor] Dostoieffsky.

Item Number: 117776

New York: The Macmillan Company, 1913.

First edition in English that profoundly influenced Hemingway, Virginia Woolf and many others, with Dostoevsky preferring “The Idiot to all his other works,” an eloquent and powerful work that “embodies his most intimate, cherished and sacred convictions.” Octavo, original cloth. In near fine condition. Translated by Constance Garnett. An exceptional example.

The Idiot displays the greatest "hallmarks of Dostoevsky's genius—the probing of the depths of the mind and the revelations of the startling contradictions in men's souls" (Hornstein, 160). "The novel is the most personal of all his major works, the book in which he embodies his most intimate, cherished and sacred convictions… It is only in The Idiot that Dostoevsky includes an account of his ordeal before the firing squad… Also afflicted with the epilepsy from which Dostoevsky suffered, Prince Myshkin is overcome, at the onset of this disease, with the same ecstatic intuition of supernatural plenitude that Dostoevsky both cherished as a divine visitation and feared as the harbinger of madness" (Frank, Dostoevsky IV:316). Dostoevsky "preferred The Idiot to all his other works… it possesses, in exemplary directness, the ancient riddle of the tragic hero" (Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, 171-8). Culminating in what is "beyond question one of the most powerful finales in world literature" (Kjetsaa, 227), the novel references Rousseau, Shakespeare, Pushkin, Gogol and Cervantes, and especially cites Flaubert's Madame Bovary, which "appears directly in The Idiot as Nastasya Filippovna's reading material in the last days of her life" (Knapp, Dostoevsky's The Idiot, 44). Together with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky was "integral to the flowering of the Russian novel in the 19th century… in them was assembled much of the light that we possess on the nature of man" (Steiner, 8).