A young man comes back to Russia on a third class carriage in November, with no luggage worth the name and a bundle under his arm. He has spent four years in a Swiss sanatorium being treated for epilepsy and idiocy. He has almost no money, one distant connection in Petersburg, and a habit of answering every question he is asked with the exact truth.
Within a day of arriving he has been taken up by a general, laughed at by a household of women, handed a portrait of the most notorious beauty in the city, and told by a merchant's son that the two of them are now rivals for her. Within a month he has money. Within a year the people who found him funny are frightened of him, and the two who love him are ruined by it.
Dostoevsky set out to do the hardest thing he could think of, which was to put a genuinely good man in a room full of ordinary people and see what happened to him. He said so in a letter while he was writing it, and he said he expected to fail. What he produced instead is a novel in which kindness works exactly like a solvent: nobody can lie comfortably in front of Prince Muishkin, so everybody lies louder, and the scenes build to those long catastrophic parties where a whole drawing room says the thing it has been holding back for two hundred pages.
It is also a book about money, illness, a burned packet of a hundred thousand roubles, a knife on a table that keeps being picked up, and a copy of a Holbein that one character says could make a man lose his faith.
This edition sets all four parts and all fifty chapters entire, in Eva Martin's translation, the one that carried this novel to English readers for most of a century. Nothing is abridged.
This is the Civil Savage Society edition, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 676 pages, set in EB Garamond and printed on 60# cream stock. Complete and unabridged.
Hardcover: casewrap edition, built for the shelf and the long haul.
Paperback: perfect bound, the same interior, meant to be carried and read to pieces.
Print editions are produced on demand. Nothing warehoused, never out of print.
