The Possessed

One of Dostoyevsky's most famous novels, this 1872 work utilizes five main characters and their philosophical ideas to describe the political chaos of Imperial Russia in the nineteenth century. Based on an actual event involving the murder of a revolutionary by his comrades, this novel depicts a band of ruthless radicals attempting to incite revolt in their small, rural community. At the center of "The Possessed" lies Dostoyevsky's desire to protest the enthusiasm for revolution he saw all around him, as well as the conservative establishment's inability to cope with those revolutionary ideas or their consequences. The author considered utopias unobtainable, and he depicts the radicals and the ideas they represent with a frightening savage intensity, as if they were possessed by demons rather than those unrealistic ideas. Perhaps the greatest political novel ever written, Dostoyevsky's "The Possessed" fully displays his devastating condemnation of human manipulation through brilliant characterization, as well as his keen and seemingly clairvoyant insight into the hearts of men. The Possessed is the most topical of Dostoevski's novels and stories. During the 1860's, the radical fringe of the Russian intelligentsia attempted to implant the ideology known as "nihilism" into the general revolutionary fervor caused by the recent abolition of serfdom. Nihilism (from the Latin nihil, meaning "nothing") was concerned more with destroying societal forms and traditions than with establishing something positive. The destructive anger of this group had been the topic of several novels already published, the most important of which was Ivan Turgenev's Ottsy i deti (1862; Fathers and Sons, 1867). The Possessed, therefore, is both an attack on nihilism, with sharp caricatures of contemporary revolutionaries, and an attempt to create the great antinihilist novel. Dostoevski's most important innovation to the antinihilist novel is the structural device of having two chief characters. These two, Pyotr Verkhovensky and Nikolai Stavrogin, embody the two sides of Dostoevski's political anger, his hatred of the Russian revolutionary left, and his violent distrust of the Russian aristocracy.