Greece Hotels Travel - The Idiot
|
List Price: $14.95
greece-hotels-travel.com Price: $10.17
Your Save: $ 4.78 ( 32% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Vintage
|
Average Customer Rating:  
|
|
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 891.733
EAN: 9780375702242
ISBN: 0375702245
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 656
Publication Date: 2003-07-08
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 2003-07-08
Studio: Vintage
|
|
|
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews:
|
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s masterful translation of The Idiot is destined to stand with their versions of Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Demons as the definitive Dostoevsky in English.
After his great portrayal of a guilty man in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky set out in The Idiot to portray a man of pure innocence. The twenty-six-year-old Prince Myshkin, following a stay of several years in a Swiss sanatorium, returns to Russia to collect an inheritance and “be among people.” Even before he reaches home he meets the dark Rogozhin, a rich merchant’s son whose obsession with the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna eventually draws all three of them into a tragic denouement. In Petersburg the prince finds himself a stranger in a society obsessed with money, power, and manipulation. Scandal escalates to murder as Dostoevsky traces the surprising effect of this “positively beautiful man” on the people around him, leading to a final scene that is one of the most powerful in all of world literature.
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Was Prince Myshkin a Sociopath?
Comment: Counted among Dostoevsky's greatest masterworks, The Idiot impresses on many levels. The characters are soulful and tempestuous amidst the swirl of events surrounding the sudden appearance of a Russian blue-blood named Prince Myshkin, who suffers from both epilepsy and a gaucheness that's ill-suited to St. Petersburg life.
Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin is considered a fool by all who meet him, including two bombshells, a courtesan named Nastassya Filippovna and a young, mischievous society beauty named Agalya, both of whom fall madly in love with his openness and exciting unpredictability. The young man, in his twenties, returns their romantic love in a singular way: Agalya he loves romantically and Nastassya he loves with a kind of messianic compassion. The complications and various kinds of love escalate from there, and through Dostoevsky's wonderful prose, we get to experience a morality play where beauty and goodness are cast against storms of human darkness and intrigue.
If this all sounds like a great read, it is, but by choosing an avatar like Prince Myshkin as an embodiment of purity, Dostoevsky is forced to deal with the repercussions, namely the problem of developing a savior-like hero who's not--decidedly not--an actual deity; the author's contrast between Myshkin and Christ in the novel can only go so far. Indeed, the prince is a bull in a china shop who teeters on the edge of madness himself, and as his passions wind up to stratospheric levels and he lashes out in terror at the facile images around him, we find the most honest and compassionate characters in the novel are not of him, but are of those who love him. Especially the sublime Agalya, who, despite her puckish ways, remains a rock in Myshkin's sea and her mother Lizaveta, whose steadfastness contrasts sharply with Myshkin's infidelity.
Interestingly, Myshkin is asexual. His soulful and disembodied love for two women never boils into lust, and although the young man becomes choked with emotion, it's invariably over the lots and predicaments in which he finds himself rather than amidst carnal desire for his beau ideals. More disturbingly, via his purity and distance from the fray, the prince stands apart from humanity, so when his love interests are torn and suffering, it seems beyond his capacity to rush to their aid, even with an embrace.
This is a fascinating character study, but Dostoevsky seems muddled here. The prince is a contradiction between indifference and compassion whose complexity says more about his own psychology than it does about virtue or human nature. Part of the problem here may be a prudish sensibility and insufficient editing on Dostoevsky's part, but the greater part of it, I'm reluctant to say, comes from the book's lack of focus. The prince hangs back throughout the story, and by the time he's fully realized, the author exhibits a remarkable coolness toward the destruction that has crashed around Myshkin, for by this point, one fears, the protagonist's goodness has reversed.
My Titles
Shadow Fields
Snooker Glen
Dasha
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Comment: A dense and superbly constructed novel by Dostoevsky is in many ways more complex than his great 'Crime and Punishment,' though it certainly does not rival the latter in its control of psychological tension. 'The Idiot,' is a highly allegorical novel about Prince Myshkin, a simple and Christ-like man who only contains conventionally moral qualities. Dostoevsky is exploring the theme of the relationship between a purely good man and his society, and reveals that the purely good man brings nothing but ruin to those around him. Rogozhin, the dark and rich man who is Myshkin's rival throughout the story, is the counterpoint to Myshkin's simplicity and goodness. The characters of the 'Idiot,' are often one dimensional ideas; many of the criticisms that Nabokov leveled at 'Crime and Punishment' are actually more evident here. Nevertheless, there are haunting passages describing epilepsy and religious doubt. Dostoevsky proves once again that he is a redoubtable master of blending narrative and penetrating philosophical and theological inquiry.
Customer Rating:
Summary: One of the Great Works of a Genius
Comment: Dostoevsky's, The Idiot, revolves around the main character Prince Myshkin who is a man of profound goodness. However, the other characters in the novel are quite the opposite; they connive, plot, and claw for worldly things such as money, profitable marriages, and improving their social status. Myshkin's inability to play the social game along with them and his ingenuous nature leads to his own downfall as well as the self destruction of the other characters in the novel which tailspins into a brilliant finale. Also, I was very pleased to see that the battle between intellectualism and spiritualism played out in this novel like it does in his other works. The Idiot certainly brings you further into Dostoevsky's world and enlightens you with his genius so it is well worth reading.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good
Comment: Many critics have oddly tried to cast The Idiot as a thinly veiled autobiographical piece due to the fact that Dostoevsky, himself, suffered from epilepsy, but how this fact- that Myshkin is Dostoevsky- even were it true, helps the books be understood better, is never clarified. Another of the related main ideas that many critics wrongly point out in this novel is how Prince Myshkin is also seen as a de facto Jesus Christ-like stand in, but this can only be posited by a severe misinterpretation of the Christ myth. Yes, Myshkin is a devout Christian believer- in the old non-Born Again sense, and he seems preternaturally good, but he also subtly manipulates others, perhaps for their own good, if we accept the omniscient narrator's version of the tale's events, yet that very fact runs counter to the Christian beliefs of Jesus Christ as a totally selfless being, as do a number of other facts about Myshkin in the book. As with those critics that rather simplistically see Crime And Punishment as a great pro-Christian document, those who see Myshkin as a Christ-like figure see only those qualities in the character that fit their mold, and conveniently ignore those that do not fit. This is because too often the artist is conflated with his aistic creation. Yet, if as some believe, that Myshkin is also patterned after Dostoevsky, `evidenced' by when Myshkin, at a party, late in the novel, embarrasses the Epanchins when he goes on and on with a very reactionary screed on religion that many critics insist is really Dostoevsky's own pontifications mouthed by his fictive surrogate, does this not also logically mean that Dostoevsky must be claiming himself a Christ-like figure, perhaps because, like a god, an artist is a creator of worlds? You can obviously see how quickly such facile and unsupported critical notions lead to silliness.
Also, this notion is vitiated by the fact that other non-major characters often speak with a dramatic and logical force equal to Myshkin's, and often in opposition to his views, yet they are somehow not claimed to be Dostoevskian surrogates. As example, at one of the many parties in the novel, a minor character rails that social liberalism is contrary to Russians norms, that a liberal cannot be a Russian, and vice-versa. He says that liberalism is a foreign scourge from the decadent Western European nations, and that social liberalism attacks the very foundations of the Russian social system. This plea for an almost Fascist state is uttered with quite the same conviction as Myshkin's devoutly held religious beliefs, but no critics try to conflate the sentiments that character expresses with those held by Dostoevsky. Why? Merely because it's all said by a minor character, and myopic critics cannot believe that a held truth can be uttered in a sly fashion, in an offhanded way? I am not arguing for the proposition that those sentiments were Dostoevsky's own, but if I were, they would have the same minimal heft as those who argue that Myshkin's every ideal is a Dostoevskian one, even as the author claimed he wanted to create a wholly decent and guileless character, something one might safely assume Dostoevsky never posited himself as being, lest he'd never be able to be a real artist. Subtlety, it seems, eludes most critical interpretations of art.
Another flaw that haunts the book, and goes hand in hand with the baroqueness of the dialogue, is the length of the book, and, again, as in Crime And Punishment, the dreadful use of an anticlimactic epilogue- chapter twelve of the fourth section, although only one is used in this book. Simply dismissing this as `the style' relieves no modern reader of the burden of wading through unwieldy descriptions and pointless digressions woven merely to show how deeply sketched the background world the main narratives play out against is. Another thing that tests the patience of a modern reader is for Dostoevsky to never merely refer to a character by a Christian name or surname, but by both, often with one or more middle names tossed into the mix, yet then, in the next paragraph, sentence, or breath have that person referred to by a mere nickname, making it seem as if another character has entered the scene, when they have not.
As for the title, The Idiot? I'm surprised that more critical attention has not centered on the question as to whom the title actually refers to. Of course, on the surface level, it refers to Prince Myshkin, but it could also refer to Rogozhin, who is reduced to murderous insanity, or to the narcissistic vanity of Aglaia, or the masochism of Anastassya. In all of Dostoevsky's works I've read thus far, Myshkin is easily the most well-rounded, authentically detailed, and `sane' major character the writer created, so this makes the question of the title's true referent all the more pertinent, and perplexing in its lack of critical discussion. Another avenue of thought for the title's meaning could be that it does principally refer to Myshkin, but not for the obvious reasons, but because we realize that he is intelligent enough to recognize the flaws that the other characters mock and tease him of, yet chooses to do nothing to improve his lot. Certainly, this is `idiotic', in the common vernacular, and as idiotic as any of the other characters' actions.
Yet, despite its flaws, The Idiot is leagues above what passes for literature these days. If only there were not so many Cliffs Notes type sites that contribute to the dumbing down and homogenization of thought about classic novels, many people, especially those younger people in college, would not so easily regurgitate the same misperceptions about such works that are easily disproved simply by reading the work. Imagine that, getting the essence of a book by actually reading it. Perhaps I, and my essays, can start a trend?
Customer Rating:
Summary: Was prince Myshkin really a positively beautiful individual?????
Comment: Dostoevsky's messiah, prince Myshkin, cannot save the corrupt world he enters. In a dark world that is torn apart by desire, money and chaos, Myshkin's compassion didn't save the sinners he cared for; rather it pushed them to complete and total destruction. In the end, Myshkin's failure forced him into despair and insanity.
Dostoevsky, strongly represents his personal beliefs in "the idiot": discussing religion as feelings instead of rules and rituals, expressing beauty as "enigma" that can't be defined, interacting with sinners and adulterers. Also, Myshkin, like Dostoevsky, suffered from epilepsy.
Unlike critics, I like to think of Dostoevsky as much deeper than just portraying his idiot as the perfect messiah, while portraying all others as sinners:
-Even though, Myshkin was portrayed as the light and Rogozhin as the dark; Rogozhin is the person who was devoted to one woman, while Myshkin is the one who was torn between his romantic love of Agalya and compassionate love of Nastassya.
-Even though Myshkin perceived Agalya as the light of his soul, he couldn't be strong for her when she demanded that he choose between her and Nastassya.
-Despite Myshkin idealism, he received some pleasure from his self denial and exemplary meekness and humility. He wanted to be different, but could not resist giving into his strong attraction to the dark tempting beauty of Nastassya. Typical man, chasing the pray gets more enticing when it tries to escape, even back in 1867.
-Good and evil had a confrontation more than once just like Myshkin and Rogozhin, but they both couldn't win and achieve their happiness. Was the confrontation a simple naïve struggle over Nastassya or was Dostoevsky portraying his own inner hell and his desperate love in real life to Suslova?
Maybe Dostoevsky didn't have all the answers to these weighty questions, but in the idiot he insinuated that the moral decay of society is not a stand alone aspect, and that humans are not merely victims. The corruption and chaos in the idiot's society was a result of the moral corruption of the characters themselves and the choices they made.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
