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). "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). 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). Item Number: 115196įirst 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.
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