by Eva Martin (Translator), Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (Author)
Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin, a young man in his mid-twenties and a descendant of one of the oldest Russian lines of nobility, is on a train to Saint Petersburg on a cold November morning. He is returning to Russia having spent the past four years in a Swiss clinic for treatment of a severe epileptic condition. On the journey Myshkin meets a young man of the merchant class, Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin, and is struck by his passionate intensity, particularly in relation to a woman-the dazzling society beauty Nastassya Filippovna-with whom he is obsessed. Rogozhin has just inherited a very large fortune from his dead father and he intends to use it to pursue the object of his desire. Joining in their conversation is a civil servant named Lebedyev - an "omniscient" gentleman with a profound knowledge of social trivia and gossip. Realizing who Rogozhin is, he firmly attaches himself to him.
Author Biography
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky (11 November 1821- 9 February 1881) is considered one of two greatest prose writers of Russian literature, alongside close contemporary Leo Tolstoy. Dostoevsky's works have had a profound and lasting effect on twentieth-century thought and world literature. Dostoevsky's chief ouevre, mainly novels, explore the human psychology in the disturbing political, social and spiritual context of his 19th-century Russian society. Considered by many as a founder or precursor of 20th-century existentialism, his Notes from Underground (1864), written in the anonymous, embittered voice of the Underground Man, is considered by Walter Kaufmann as the "best overture for existentialism ever written."