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Shop nowThe Idiot
Narrator
Simon Vance
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Translator
Constance Garnett
Length
22 hours 30 minutes
Language
English
In The Idiot, a saintly man, Prince Myshkin, is thrust into the heart of a society more concerned with wealth, power, and sexual conquest than the ideals of Christianity. Myshkin soon finds himself at the center of a violent love triangle in which a notorious woman and a beautiful young girl become rivals for his affections. Extortion, scandal, and murder follow, testing the wreckage left by human misery to find “man in man.”
The Idiot is a quintessentially Russian novel, one that penetrates the complex psyche of the Russian people. “They call me a psychologist,” wrote Dostoevsky. “That is not true. I’m only a realist in the higher sense; that is, I portray all the depths of the human soul.”
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian novelist, journalist, and short-story writer whose psychological penetration into the darkest recesses of the human heart had a profound and universal influence on the twentieth-century novel. He was born in Moscow, the son of a surgeon. Leaving the study of engineering for literature, he published Poor Folk in 1846. As a member of revolutionary circles in St. Petersburg, he was condemned to death in 1849. A last-minute reprieve sent him to Siberia for hard labor. Returning to St. Petersburg in 1859, he worked as a journalist and completed his masterpiece, Crime and Punishment, as well as other works, including The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov.
Simon Vance is an award-winning actor and an AudioFile Golden Voice with over fifty Earphones Awards and thirteen prestigious Audie Awards. He was named Booklist’s very first Voice of Choice in 2008 and an AudioFile Best Voice of 2009.
Constance Garnett (1862–1946) translated the works of numerous Russian authors, including Tolstoy, Gogol, Pushkin, and Turgenev.
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Reviews
“My intention is to portray a really beautiful soul.”
“Nothing is outside Dostoevsky’s province…Out of Shakespeare there is no more exciting reading.”
“I think The Idiot to be a masterpiece…a fact of world literature just as important as the densely dramatic Brothers Karamazov or the brilliantly subtle and terrifying Devils.”
“Rivals any modern soap opera for complexity.”
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