The Idiot: a New Translation

The acclaimed translator of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov returns with a definitive new rendering of Dostoevsky’s most enigmatic and poignant novel

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 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 while 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.

Michael R. Katz’s translation of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (ISBN 9781324095101) was praised as:

“Katz's lucid, unpretentious language opens up my favourite scenes, characters and even monologues."" — Lan Samantha Chang, The Guardian ""Lively, fast-flowing.... the voiciest translation of the novel thus far. [Katz] writes at the fever pitch of speech, unleashing the speed and the chaos of the original."" — Jennifer Wilson, The New Yorker