Der Idiot

Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was born in Moscow as the son of a military doctor and a merchant's daughter. He studied at the Petersburg Engineering School and dedicated himself entirely to writing from 1845 onwards. In 1849, he was arrested as a member of an early socialist circle and sentenced to death. Just before his execution, the sentence was commuted to four years of hard labor followed by military service as a private in Siberia. In 1859, Dostoevsky returned to Petersburg, where he repositioned himself as a writer and increasingly as a publicist.

Major works: "Poor Folk" (1846), "The Double" (1846), "Humiliated and Insulted" (1861), "Notes from the House of the Dead" (1862), "Crime and Punishment" (1866), "The Gambler" (1866), "The Idiot" (1869), "Demons" (1873), "The Adolescent" (1875), "The Brothers Karamazov" (1880).

Afterword by: Michael Wegner

Michael Wegner (born 1930 in Kaunas, Lithuania) was a professor of Russian literary history at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena until 1991. He is the editor of the Gogol edition and the renowned Dostoevsky edition published by Aufbau Verlag, and he is the author of publications on the history and theory of the novel as well as on German-Russian cultural relations.