There are many things I’m interested in covering about the Limited Editions Club’s 1956 edition of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Have a look at further information about The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Limited Editions Club, or the UBC collection this edition belongs to through the links provided!

The first and most prominent aspect of this particular edition of the novel are the woodcut engraving illustrations by Fritz Eichenberg. Fritz Eichenberg (October 24, 1901 – November 30, 1990) was a German-American illustrator and arts educator who worked primarily in wood engraving.

He was born to a Jewish family in Cologne, Germany. Throughout his life he was politically outspoken, was anti-war, and a public critic of the Nazis. He worked as a printer’s apprentice, and studied at the Municipal School of Applied Arts in Cologne and the Academy of Graphic Arts in Leipzig, where he studied under Hugo Steiner-Prag.

Fritz Eichenberg, photo by Beverly Hall.

In his prolific career as a book illustrator, Eichenberg worked with many forms of literature but specialized in material with elements of extreme spiritual and emotional conflict, fantasy, or social satire, illustrating such authors as include Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Poe, Swift, and Grimmelshausen. He also wrote and illustrated books of folklore and children’s stories.