How long does it take to read The Idiot?
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky takes about 11 hours 23 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 11 hours 23 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 1874. 621 pages, about 170,775 words.
23 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 18 hours 59 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 11 hours 23 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 7 hours 7 minutes |
The page count is the median across 548 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Inspired by an image of Christ's suffering, Fyodor Dostoyevsky set out to portray "a truly beautiful soul" colliding with the brutal reality of contemporary society. Returning to St. Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, the gentle and naive Prince Myshkin—known as "the idiot"—pays a visit to his distant relative General Yepanchin and proceeds to charm the General and his circle. But after becoming infatuated with the beautiful Nastasya Filippovna, Myshkin finds himself caught up in a love triangle and drawn into a web of blackmail, betrayal, and, ultimately, murder. This new translation by David McDuff is sensitive to the shifting registers of the original Russian, capturing the nervous, elliptic flow of the narrative for a new generation of readers.
Subjects: Notebooks, sketchbooks, Fiction, general, Russia in fiction, Fiction, Social conditions, Social life and customs
