Demons (Annotated)

The Devils, or The Possessed — Dostoevsky's Prophetic Novel of Revolution, in the Constance Garnett Translation, with a Critical Study and a Life of the Author

De: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

This annotated edition of Demons includes:

• The suppressed chapter "At Tikhon's" — Stavrogin's confession, restored
• A 14,000-word critical study, "The Arithmetic of the Absolute"
• The real crime behind the novel: the Nechaev murder of 1869
• On the Gadarene swine — how the epigraph is the argument
• A full life of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881)

A provincial Russian town, a cell of revolutionaries, and a murder meant to bind them in blood.

In 1869 a student named Ivanov was killed by his own revolutionary circle, on the orders of a charismatic young agitator, to weld the group together through shared guilt. Dostoevsky read the news and saw the whole of the coming century in it.

Demons — published as The Possessed for most of its English life, and as The Devils for much of the rest — is the novel he built from that murder, and the most prophetic book ever written. Decades before the revolutions it seemed to foresee, it laid bare the exact logic by which a beautiful idea becomes a corpse: how utopian certainty licenses cruelty, and how the man who believes nothing — the hollow, magnetic Stavrogin — becomes the vacuum into which every ideology rushes.

The three English titles are not a muddle. They are two halves of one image. Dostoevsky's epigraph is the Gadarene swine of Luke's Gospel: the demons are driven out of a possessed man and into a herd of pigs, which stampede over a cliff and drown. Russia is the possessed man. The imported ideas are the demons. The Possessed names the sufferer; Demons names what rides him — and the novel is about the moment the two can no longer be told apart.

This Erato Press edition prints the novel in the classic Constance Garnett translation and restores the chapter Dostoevsky was forced to cut — "At Tikhon's," Stavrogin's confession, without which, as readers have long insisted, Stavrogin is a locked room with no key. Around the complete text stand a substantial original study — of the real crime, the epigraph, the hollow center, and the prophecy that only deepened after the Terror it seemed to predict — and a full life of the author. Of all his novels, this is the one the twentieth century kept reading as a warning. It has not stopped being one.