The Possessed (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Elizabeth Dalton (Introduction), Constance Garnett (Translator)

Overview

The Possessed, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics:

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All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.

 

Famous for accurately predicting twentieth-century totalitarianism, Dostoevsky’s The Possessed is an emphatic howl of protest against the fervor of revolution and terrorism that gripped Russia toward the end of the nineteenth century.

Based on a true event, in which a young revolutionary was murdered by his comrades, The Possessed provoked a storm of controversy for its harsh depiction of a ruthless band of Russian intellectuals, atheists, socialists, anarchists, and other radicals who attempt to incite the population of a small provincial town to revolt against the government. In contrast to Dostoevsky’s savage portrait of these radicals and the violent ideas that have possessed them like demons, the author expresses great sympathy for workers and other ordinary people ill-served by those who presume to speak in their name.

Often regarded as the greatest political novel ever written, The Possessed showcases Dostoevsky’s genius for characterization, his amazing insight into the human heart, and his shattering criticism of the desire to sway and control the thought and behavior of others.

Elizabeth Dalton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Barnard College. She is the author of Unconscious Structure in The Idiot, a psychoanalytic study of Dostoevsky’s novel.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781411432956
Publisher:	Barnes & Noble
Publication date:	06/01/2009
Series:	Barnes & Noble Classics Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	768
Sales rank:	76,417
File size:	3 MB
Age Range:	3 Months to 18 Years

About the Author

Elizabeth Dalton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Barnard College. She is the author of Unconscious Structure in The Idiot, a psychoanalytic study of Dostoevsky’s novel.

Read an Excerpt

From Elizabeth Dalton’s Introduction to The Possessed

The Possessed is the greatest novel ever written about the politics of revolution. It prefigures the political novels of Conrad, Malraux, and Koestler, as well as the work of Camus. Published in 1871, Dostoevsky’s novel foretold with uncanny prescience events that would occur almost fifty years later during the Bolshevik Revolution and the Communist tyranny that followed. Its “possessed” characters, unleashed on a sleepy provincial town, wreak destruction as if in the grip of demonic possession, thereby foretelling what will happen in real life when, as one of them says, “Russia will be overwhelmed with darkness, the earth will weep for its old gods.” The novel’s relevance, however, is not limited to Russia and its revolution. With its cast of idealistic murderers and suicides, seductive madmen and glamorous fanatics, The Possessed is a novel for our time as well.

The political theme is interwoven with a tragic love story and framed in a chronicle of provincial life rich in comic characters and incidents. In the end, however, everything leads to the central concerns of all Dostoevsky’s work: his tortured debate with himself over Christianity and the existence of God, and his penetrating analysis of the psyche, of both its ecstatic visions of harmony and its darkest and most perverse impulses.

Freud, who claimed that creative writers were the true discoverers of the unconscious, drew his own conception of the unconscious partly from his reading of Dostoevsky, whom he considered the greatest of all novelists. The inner life of the mind has been the subject of modern literature as well as of psychoanalysis. The representation of the psyche by the great modern writers—among them Joyce, Proust, Gide, Woolf, Kafka, Faulkner, and Beckett—owes a great deal to Dostoevsky’s dissections of the minds of Stavrogin, Kirillov, and the other heroes and antiheroes of his novels.

Although The Possessed developed far beyond Dostoevsky’s original intention, it began as a polemic. In a letter of March 1870, he wrote, “What I’m writing is a tendentious piece; I want to state my opinions fervently. (The Nihilists and Westernizers will start yelling about me that I’m a reactionary!) But to hell with them—I’ll state all my opinions down to the last word” (Complete Letters, vol. 3, p. 246; see “For Further Reading”). As installments began appearing in the Russian Herald, a Petersburg monthly, The Possessed did indeed arouse furious controversy: The left-wingers, the “Nihilists and Westernizers,” saw it as a slanderous attack, and the right-wing Slavophils, the defenders of the monarchy and the Russian Orthodox Church, took it as an unqualified endorsement of their views. During the Communist era, the novel continued to be read as a political document, a reactionary attack on socialism, and for nearly forty years no separate edition could be printed, although it was available in an academic edition of Dostoevsky’s collected works. Those who managed to read it, and who were themselves living through the era of arrests, trials, imprisonments, and executions it foretold, wondered how its author could have imagined so fully what had not yet happened.

In fact, The Possessed was based partly on real events. The immediate stimulus was the “Nechayev Affair” of 1869. A student named Ivanov, a member of a revolutionary group called the People’s Avengers, was murdered by his fellow conspirators at the instigation of their leader, Sergey Nechayev, who convinced them that Ivanov was about to denounce them to the authorities. Dostoevsky, then living in Dresden, read the newspaper accounts of this case and used it as the point of departure for a depiction of the political and intellectual atmosphere of Russia in the late 1860s. An even more important source of the novel, however, was his own experience of conspiracy twenty years earlier as a member of the Petrashevsky Circle. Like the “quintet” in The Possessed, the Petrashevsky conspirators were trying to acquire a secret printing press on which to produce anti-government leaflets, a capital offense in Tsarist Russia. In 1849 they were arrested and condemned to death, led onto the scaffold to be shot, and at the last minute reprieved and sent to Siberia.

Dostoevsky’s background was far from revolutionary. His father, a military physician, was descended from impoverished minor Lithuanian nobility. Konstantin Mochulsky, in Dostoevsky: His Life and Work, describes the father as “a man of extremely difficult temperament, sullen, contentious, suspicious, . . . subject to attacks of depression. His personality was a fusion of cruelty and sensibility, piety and avarice” (p. 8). The family—parents and seven children, of whom Fyodor Mikhailovitch was the second—lived in straitened circumstances in a three-room house on the grounds of the Maryinsky military hospital in Moscow. Dostoevsky received, nonetheless, an excellent education, reading widely in Russian, English, and European literature. At his father’s insistence, he was sent in 1838 to the academy of military engineering in Petersburg, where he was miserable.