The Idiot: a novel in four parts. [Translated] from the Russian by Constance Garnett. (The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, volume ii) Fyodor DOSTOEVSKY

Red cloth, roundels in blind on upper and lower covers. Spine dull, a little faded as usual with faint wear at head, two corners slightly bumped, front hinge mildly cracked at head but firm, front endpapers mildly spotted, rear free endpaper embrowned. First edition of Garnett's translation (novel first serialised in Russian, 1868-9, first English translation, by Frederick Whishaw, published by Vizetelly, 1887), with the ("Books think for me") bookplate of Hume C. Pinsent. Constance Garnett was the pre-eminent champion of Russian literature for the English public. In the words of her Oxford DNB notice, Heinemann's "comprehensive" 12-volume edition of the Dostoevsky novels "actually provoked a literary craze". A descendant of the philosopher David Hume's brother John, Hume Chancellor Pinsent (1857-1920) was Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge, 1879-85, and later a solicitor in Birmingham, where he was Honorary Treasurer of the university. His eldest child, David Hume Pinsent (1891-1918), was a close friend and collaborator of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a devotee of Dostoevsky; he read The Brothers Karamazov so often, wrote his biographer Ray Monk, "he knew whole passages of it by heart". A copy of it accompanied him to the Russian front in 1916.