Demons: A Novel in Three Parts

Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horrified Russians in 1869, Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a "novel-pamphlet" in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What he emerged with in 1872 was at once his darkest novel until The Brothers Karamazov and his most ferociously funny. For alongside its relentlessly escalating plot of conspiracy and assassination, "Demons" (which earlier translators inaccurately titled The Possessed) is a blistering comedy of ideas run amok. And, like all or Dostoevsky's novels, it is also a riot of literary voices, whose profusion, energy, and variety are rendered wonderfully in this English version by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.