I cannot think of another novel that begins as strongly as The Idiot: the entire first part, nearly 200 pages, is a work unto itself, a tragedy obeying the Aristotleian unities of time and action (albeit not of place), occupying roughly a single day and focusing on the prince’s first encounters with the novel’s two opposed heroines.
This authorial chaos may well explain the novel’s inchoate quality it took me three weeks to read, largely because I had no idea what was going on in parts two and three, which come between the incomparably powerful first and last sections. The second two parts are phantasmagoric and rambling, unplotted and fitfully energetic. Dostoevsky appears not to have had a clear idea of how to proceed. The first part of the novel, as it appeared, is acknowledged to be powerful. The good prince appears in the early notes as proud and demonic, and the rapist of his adopted sister (a prototype of Nastasya Filippovna). Anna preserved the notebooks, which show that both plot and characters were in a state of fluid and volcanic chaos, even while the book was appearing. Dostoevsky gambled suicidally and had epileptic fits. It was written abroad, unlike his previous novels, for serial publication, put together by his second wife and stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna. The writing and publication of the novel were certainly both tortured and strained. Byatt describes the difficult circumstances of this strange novel’s composition: They are married and live in France.In her review of David McDuff’s 2004 translation of The Idiot (I myself read the 2002 Pevear and Volokhonsky version), the novelist A. They were awarded the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for their version of The Brothers Karamazov, and more recently Demons was one of three nominees for the same prize. Together, Pevear and Volokhonsky have translated Dead Souls and The Collected Tales by Nikolai Gogol, and The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, Demons, and The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
She has translated works by the prominent Orthodox theologians Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff into Russian.
Larissa Volokhonsky was born in Leningrad. He has received fellowships or grants for translation from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the French Ministry of Culture. Richard Pevear has published translations of Alain, Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Savinio, Pavel Florensky, and Henri Volohonsky, as well as two books of poetry.
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