Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Possessed
1913 · 666 pages
- Author
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Edition
- A novel in three parts, translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett; The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, volume III
- Published
- New York, The Macmillan Company, 1913
- Pages
- 666
- File
- DjVu, 90.9 MB
- Text search
- yes
- Rights
- public domain
Reading on an iPhone or iPad?
4.2 on the App Store4.2 · Read offline, with bookmarks and Read Aloud.
About the book
The Possessed, also known in English as Demons or The Devils, is Dostoevsky’s novel about revolutionary conspiracy in a Russian provincial town. It was serialised in The Russian Messenger in 1871 and 1872 and took its starting point from a real case: the murder of a student by members of Sergei Nechayev’s secret society in Moscow in 1869.
The story is told by a local chronicler. Stepan Trofimovitch Verkhovensky, an elderly liberal of the 1840s, lives on the patronage of the wealthy Varvara Petrovna; his son Pyotr arrives as the organiser of a small revolutionary cell, and around the mysterious, magnetic Nikolay Stavrogin gather the conspirators and the believers, among them Shatov and Kirillov. Intrigue, scandal and a disastrous charity fête lead to fire and murder. The title and the epigraphs from Pushkin and from the Gospel of Luke, about devils entering a herd of swine, set out Dostoevsky’s view of the ideas that possessed his generation.
Constance Garnett’s translation appeared in 1913 as the third volume of her series of Dostoevsky’s novels; it does not include the chapter “At Tikhon’s”, which the original journal had refused to print.
Contents
Tap a chapter to open the book there.
About this edition
Constance Garnett’s translation in the American issue of the Macmillan Company, New York, volume III of The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky, printed in England at the Ballantyne Press. The title page is undated; the year 1913 comes from the Wikisource index, and the list facing the title page names only The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot as earlier volumes. The book opens with epigraphs from Pushkin and the Gospel of Luke and a contents list of the three parts. The scanned copy comes from the University of Virginia library and carries digitisation notices in the margins; it has a text layer.
How to read it
- The book opens right in your browser, on a phone or a computer: nothing to install, no sign-up.
- Search works across the whole book.
- In the reader you can jump between chapters, zoom, switch to a night page and save the book as a PDF.
Source
A scan from the Wikimedia Foundation's open projects. The book is in the public domain: free to read, download and share.