The Devils

by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Book Overview

"What I am writing now is a tendentious thing," Dostoyevsky wrote to a friend in connection with his first outline for The Devils . "I feel like saying everything as passionately as possible. (Let the nihilists and the Westerners scream that I am reactionary ) To hell with them. I shall say everything to the last word." As Dostoyevsky predicted, The Devils , or The Possessed , was indeed denounced by radical critics as the work of a reactionary renegade...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140440356
• ISBN13: 9780140440355
• Release Date: February 1954
• Publisher: Penguin Group
• Length: 704 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.2" x 7.7"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

A masterpiece of characterization

I was intrigued when John Updike picked this over Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov as one of the ten greatest works of literature of the millenium. After reading it I still claim that Karamazov is better, but this novel is certainly not to be missed. It is touter than some of Dostoevsky's other works, and it contains some of his best characterizations, all suffused with a very dark and very penetrating sense of humor. No one will forget the nihilist Kirilov, who wishes to kill himself in order to become God, the naive aesthete Stepan Trofimovitch and his final, farcical escape into peasant Russia, or Nikolai Stavrogin, haunted by a terrible crime that is made all the worse because it is too ordinary. The whole novel is an unabashed piece of anti-revolutionary (indeed, reactionary) propaganda, but even the characters that are intended as caricatures come across as fascinating and oddly believable. This novel displays as well as any other of his works the author's extraordinary understanding of the tortured ways of the human spirit.

A great soap opera.

The book is long and melodrmatic. Deeper than that, the nihlistic movments in Russia is intresting to see devolop.