Did you finish The Possessed and still feel like you never actually met Nikolay Stavrogin, the man everyone in the book cannot stop talking about? I felt exactly that after my first read, and it turns out there is a textual reason for the fog.
The copy most of us download for free, a 706-page Constance Garnett translation from 1916 (mine came through Global Grey, sourced from holybooks.com), is missing an entire chapter that Dostoevsky’s own editor refused to print back in 1871.
I only found this out after I finished the book and went looking for why Stavrogin’s motives still felt like a locked door. What follows is my full breakdown of the novel itself, plus the missing piece that a lot of readers never learn is missing at all.
Overview
Dostoevsky took a real 1869 murder and used it to show what happens when a group of people replace God with an idea, and the free edition most readers get today is quietly missing the one chapter that explains his coldest, most important character.
The Possessed is a perfect nobel for readers who already loved Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov and want Dostoevsky at his angriest and most political, people who keep hearing this book called “prophetic” and want to see why for themselves, and anyone who enjoys long, unresolved philosophical arguments between characters who never quite agree.
I would not recommend The Possessed to first-time Dostoevsky readers (start with Crime and Punishment instead), anyone who wants a tight, fast-moving plot, or readers who get lost when a cast of twenty characters go by first name, patronymic, surname, and nickname within the same page.
Table of Contents
Introduction
The Possessed (Бесы, transliterated as Besy) is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1872 novel. It was serialized in the journal The Russian Messenger between January 1871 and December 1872, then collected into a single volume in 1873.
I read it in the Constance Garnett translation, first published in 1916, which is still the text sitting behind most of the free digital copies in circulation right now, including the one I worked from for this piece.
Depending on which translator you land on, you will also see this same novel shelved under two other English titles, The Devils and Demons. One Russian word, three different English doors into it.
Background
Dostoevsky did not invent this plot out of thin air. In November 1869, a Moscow student named Ivan Ivanov was murdered by members of his own small revolutionary circle, on the order of a radical named Sergei Nechaev, apparently to bind the group together through the shared guilt of a killing. Dostoevsky read about the case in the papers and used it as the skeleton for Pyotr Verkhovensky’s plot against Shatov later in this novel.
He had his own history with underground politics too.
Two decades earlier, he had been arrested for belonging to the Petrashevsky circle, marched out for a mock execution, and then sent to a Siberian penal colony for four years.
By the time The Possessed finished its serialization, he was around fifty years old, still writing under constant financial pressure, and clearly furious at what he saw as a young, imported, Western-style radicalism eating away at Russian society from the inside. That anger is on every page of this book, and it explains why the story reads less like a mystery and more like an argument Dostoevsky is having with his own country.
The Possessed Summary
I am going to walk through this novel exactly as Dostoevsky structured it, in three parts, with every major plot point and the ending included. If you would rather discover it fresh, this is your stopping point.
Part 1: A Quiet Town Gets a Visitor
The Possessed is narrated by an unnamed local chronicler, a device that lets Dostoevsky report rumor and hearsay alongside fact, which matters later.
He opens not with the title character but with Stepan Trofimovitch Verhovensky, an aging, vain, once-fashionable liberal intellectual who has spent years as the paid companion, and possibly former lover, of the wealthy widow Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin.
Stepan Trofimovitch likes to think of himself as a “persecuted” man and an “exile,” even though, as the narrator admits early on, he was never actually persecuted by anyone. He tutored Varvara Petrovna’s son, Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch Stavrogin, as a boy, and it is Stavrogin’s return to the provincial town, after a stretch of military service, disgrace, and travel abroad, that sets everything moving.
Stavrogin comes back changed, and not in a way anyone can explain. Without any apparent reason, he starts committing what the narrator calls “incredible outrages.” At the club, in front of the town’s most respected men, he grabs a stuffy committee member named Gaganov by the nose and marches him a few steps across the room, then offers an apology so careless it reads as a second insult.
Days later, at a party, he seizes Madame Liputin, his host’s shy young wife, and kisses her on the lips in front of the whole room, for no reason he ever gives. Then, when the mild old governor, Ivan Ossipovitch, gently asks him what is driving these acts, Stavrogin bends down as if to whisper a secret in his ear and bites it instead, hard enough that the governor nearly faints from shock.
The town settles on a fever as the explanation and moves on, treating him with a strange mix of fear and fascination that never really lets up for the rest of The Possessed.
Underneath the pranks sits a genuine secret. Four years earlier, after a drunken dinner, Stavrogin married Marya Timofeevna Lebyadkina, a lame, mentally fragile woman, purely for a bet, and has kept the marriage hidden ever since.
Her brother, the drunken, blustering Captain Lebyadkin, has followed Stavrogin to town and is using the secret to extract money from him. Meanwhile, Varvara Petrovna’s ward, Darya Pavlovna (Dasha), and the proud, restless young noblewoman Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina (Liza), both circle Stavrogin in their own ways, and Varvara Petrovna floats a plan to marry Stepan Trofimovitch off to Dasha, mostly to cover up something she cannot yet name.
Part 2: The Quintet and the Pretender
Stepan Trofimovitch’s own son, Pyotr Stepanovitch Verhovensky, arrives, and the book’s temperature changes immediately. Where his father is vain but harmless, Pyotr is calculating, tireless, and completely without a fixed belief in anything except the usefulness of chaos.
Within weeks, he is quietly organizing a local revolutionary cell, pulling in the town’s minor cranks and malcontents, among them the sour ex-official Liputin, the earnest but weak Virginsky, the buffoonish musician Lyamshin, and a strange, intense theorist named Shigalov, who has built an entire private system of social organization around one blunt admission: “starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.”
Pyotr also has a separate, more personal project. He wants to use Stavrogin, whose blank, magnetic indifference makes him a screen onto which anyone can project whatever they need to see, as a kind of hidden figurehead for a coming uprising, floating a folk legend about a lost true tsar, “Ivan the Tsarevitch,” who might reappear at the right moment.
This is also where the book’s two most searching philosophical relationships play out. Shatov, a former radical turned fierce Russian nationalist and religious mystic, was once shaped by Stavrogin’s ideas and now seems to hate him for it as much as he reveres him.
In one tense exchange, Stavrogin asks him directly whether he believes in God, and Shatov, having just finished insisting he believes in Russia, in her Orthodoxy, and in the body of Christ, can only answer, “I… I will believe in God.” Later in the same stretch of the book, Shatov crosses a crowded room and strikes Stavrogin full across the face, a blow Stavrogin, a man capable of shooting another man dead in a duel without a flicker of feeling, absorbs without retaliating at all, which unsettles everyone who sees it more than the blow itself did.
The other relationship is with Kirillov, an engineer who has convinced himself that suicide, if committed for no reason beyond the pure demonstration of free will, turns a man into what he calls the “man-god,” replacing the need for any god above him.
Stavrogin, we learn, once discussed these ideas with him half as intellectual play, and Kirillov has taken them completely, terrifyingly seriously ever since. Pyotr Stepanovitch has already noticed this and starts quietly planning to use Kirillov’s planned death for his own purposes.
Meanwhile, the old grudge over the nose-pulling incident finally erupts into a duel between Stavrogin and Gaganov, and Stavrogin, true to form, fires into the air rather than aim at his opponent, a gesture that reads less like mercy than like total indifference to whether he lives or dies.
Liza’s engagement to the decent, unremarkable Mavriky Nikolaevitch begins to fall apart as she is pulled toward Stavrogin instead, even as it becomes clearer to everyone around her that there may be nothing at the center of him to actually reach.
Part 3: The Fete, the Fire, and the Reckoning
The town’s grand charity fete, organized by the new governor’s wife, Yulia Mihailovna, who has been flattering Pyotr Verkhovensky and mistaking his manipulation for youthful reform energy, collapses into public farce: a drunken reading, a mocking “quadrille of literature,” open insults from the floor.
That same night, fire breaks out across the river in the poorer part of town, and in the chaos, Captain Lebyadkin and his sister Marya, Stavrogin’s secret wife, are murdered in their home by the escaped convict Fedka, almost certainly with Pyotr Verkhovensky’s quiet encouragement, since a Stavrogin implicated in murder is a Stavrogin who needs Pyotr more than ever.
In the middle of this, Stavrogin finally acknowledges his marriage to Marya in public, just after Liza has run off with him in a moment of reckless hope. The acknowledgment breaks her completely.
Distraught and half out of her mind, she pushes into the crowd gathering at the murder scene, and the mob, hearing someone call out that she is “Stavrogin’s woman,” turns on her and beats her to death in the street.
Pyotr Verkhovensky, needing to bind his small cell together the way Nechaev bound his in real life, decides Shatov has to die, both because Shatov has grown disgusted with the group and because his death, shared in by everyone present, will make betrayal impossible afterward.
He lures Shatov to a secluded corner of the Stavrogin family park at night with a false excuse about a hidden printing press and shoots him there, with the others standing by.
That same night, Kirillov, honoring an earlier arrangement with Pyotr to leave behind a confession covering the group’s crimes as part of his own long-planned suicide, delivers his final, feverish monologue about man replacing God through pure self-will, “If there is no God, then I am God,” and shoots himself.
Shatov’s estranged wife, Marya, who has just returned pregnant, presumably by Stavrogin, and given birth only hours earlier, dies within days from the shock of finding her husband murdered, and their newborn dies of exposure not long after.
Stepan Trofimovitch, humiliated by everything happening around him and finally shaken loose from Varvara Petrovna’s household, sets out on foot along the high road in a half-mad attempt to “seek all Russia.”
He falls seriously ill on the road, and a traveling Bible-seller, Sofya Matveyevna, cares for him until the end.
In his last hours, he has her read him the Gospel of Luke’s account of the devils cast out of a madman and into a herd of swine, the same passage Dostoevsky uses as the novel’s epigraph, and delivers his own reading of it as he lies dying: that Russia is the sick man, that the revolutionaries around him, “Petrusha and les autres avec lui,” are the devils that must come out of her and enter the swine, and that only afterward will the sick man be healed, clothed, and sitting “at the feet of Jesus.”
He dies three days later, unconscious by the end, going out, in the narrator’s words, “like a candle that is burnt down.”
The final chapter unravels everything with startling speed. Lyamshin, the weakest member of the cell, breaks under the strain and confesses the whole conspiracy to the police, crawling on his knees and volunteering details no one had even asked for yet.
Virginsky, Erkel, Liputin, and Tolkatchenko are all arrested in turn, each meeting the collapse of the plot with a different mixture of relief, defiance, or denial. Stavrogin himself has already fled abroad under a false identity, calling himself a “citizen of the canton of Uri.”
He sends one last letter to Darya Pavlovna, asking her, as he once half-jokingly asked before, to come and be his “nurse,” and confessing that he cannot manage even Kirillov’s kind of conviction: “I know I ought to kill myself… but I am afraid of showing greatness of soul.”
Days later, he returns quietly to the family estate at Skvoreshniki, climbs to the locked loft under the roof, and hangs himself with a silk cord he has carefully soaped in advance. The note beside him reads simply, “No one is to blame, I did it myself.” The doctors examining the body afterward find no evidence of insanity at all.
The Possessed Analysis
Characters
Nikolay Stavrogin sits at the center of The Possessed without ever really explaining himself, and I think that absence is the whole point rather than a flaw in it. Every other major character treats him as a kind of mirror.
Shatov sees in him the source of his own Slavophile faith. Kirillov sees in him the source of his own atheism. Pyotr Verkhovensky sees in him a mask for a revolution.
Liza sees in him an escape. None of them are describing the same man, because there may not be a whole man there to describe, only a surface capable of reflecting whatever conviction gets pointed at it.
His suicide at the end plays less like a confession of guilt and more like a final, exhausted admission that he was never capable of believing in anything strongly enough, good or evil, to live or die for it on purpose the way Kirillov did.
Pyotr Stepanovitch Verhovensky is The Possessed‘s actual engine, and he is disturbing precisely because he is never given a coherent ideology to hold. He talks socialism to some people, nationalism to others, and pure destruction when he thinks no one is really listening.
What he wants, as far as The Possessed ever lets us see, is momentum, chaos loose enough that a small, organized group can seize whatever comes out of it, a plan he half-describes to Stavrogin using Shigalov’s theories on his behalf.
His father, watching him from the outside, cannot recognize the boy he raised, and that gap between the two Verhovenskys is one of the book’s clearest statements about generations losing each other entirely.
Stepan Trofimovitch Verhovensky provides most of the novel’s comedy in its first half and nearly all of its dignity by the end. He is vain, cowardly about money, dependent on Varvara Petrovna in ways he dresses up as romance, and given to French phrases he cannot really afford to translate into action.
Yet his death, wandering the road with a woman who sells Bibles for a living, gives the book its one moment of something like grace, and his dying reading of the swine parable does more thematic work than any other single scene in the novel.
Ivan Kirillov is, for me, the most quietly devastating figure here.
His theory that a purely self-willed suicide can make a man into a god is delivered with total sincerity, no irony anywhere in it, which is exactly what makes it so unsettling. He is kind to children, thankful to spiders on the wall, capable of real tenderness, and none of that softness stops him from following his own logic all the way to the end of a loaded pistol.
Shatov carries The Possessed‘s religious counterargument to Kirillov’s atheism, insisting that a nation needs its own god the way a person needs a self, and that Russia alone still carries that kind of god within her.
Dostoevsky clearly has some sympathy for him, more than for almost anyone else in the cast, and his murder, arranged by men he had once called comrades, is the novel’s clearest echo of the real Ivanov killing that inspired the whole book.
Liza (Lizaveta Nikolaevna) is given less interior life than the male characters around her, which is a real limitation of the novel, but her death in the crowd still lands as one of its sharper moments, because it shows how quickly a town that has been gossiping about “that Stavrogin business” for months turns physically violent the instant it has a body to blame.
Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin runs her household, her estates, and Stepan Trofimovitch’s finances with a competence none of the men around her can match, and her line near the end, “I have no son,” delivered before she even knows Nikolay is dead, reads like the book quietly handing her the last word on him.
The Possessed Themes and Symbolism
The title itself carries the novel’s whole argument. Dostoevsky opens The Possessed with two epigraphs. The first is Pushkin’s poem about travelers lost in a snowstorm, misled by demons.
The second is Luke’s account of the man possessed by devils, healed by Jesus, the devils driven instead into a herd of swine that runs into a lake and drowns.
Stepan Trofimovitch’s dying speech ties both epigraphs directly to Russia itself: the country is the sick man, the imported radical ideas circling the provincial town are the devils, and Dostoevsky’s hope, however faint it reads by the book’s final page, is that the nation survives its own possession and comes out the other side “clothed and in his right mind.”
Underneath that religious framing runs a straightforward argument about ideas as contagion. Nearly every character in The Possessed has taken an idea, whether Kirillov’s man-god atheism, Shatov’s god-bearing nation, or Shigalov’s engineered equality, and let it consume the rest of their personality, until the idea is steering the person rather than the other way around.
Dostoevsky, writing at a moment when Western socialist and nihilist thought was moving fast through educated Russian circles, is arguing that a mind untethered from faith and native tradition does not become free. It becomes occupied by whatever radical certainty happens to move in next.
The generational split between Stepan Trofimovitch and his son Pyotr also does real work here, echoing the same fathers-and-sons argument Turgenev had already put on the table a decade earlier.
The older generation’s vague, cafe-society liberalism, all talk and no consequence, is shown giving way to a younger generation willing to act on ideas the fathers never really believed in themselves, and Dostoevsky clearly holds both generations responsible for what follows.
The Possessed Evaluation
I think this is one of Dostoevsky’s most demanding books, and also one of his most rewarding, once you get through the first third.
Strengths: The scene where the revolutionary cell actually gathers and Shigalov delivers his theory of “unlimited freedom” collapsing into “unlimited despotism” is some of the sharpest political comedy Dostoevsky ever wrote, funny and chilling in the same breath.
Kirillov’s chapters carry a philosophical weight that still reads as strikingly modern, and the fire, murders, and confessions of the last third move with a speed that the slower opening chapters do not prepare you for.
Weaknesses: That opening third asks a lot of patience.
Dostoevsky spends a great deal of time on provincial social comedy, including a fairly pointed satire of his literary rival Ivan Turgenev through the vain novelist character Karmazinov, and without footnotes, a lot of that satire will land flat for a reader in 2026 who has never heard of the feud behind it.
The female characters, Liza especially, are also given far less interior access than the male ideologues, so their deaths carry less individual weight than the plot clearly wants them to.
Impact and controversy: No part of The Possessed‘s history is stranger, or more relevant to how you are probably reading it right now, than what happened to the chapter titled “At Tikhon’s,” known separately as “Stavrogin’s Confession.”
Dostoevsky wrote this chapter to sit inside Part 2, giving readers a direct account, in Stavrogin’s own words, of a past act of abuse against a young girl that ended in her suicide, an act he recounts to a monk, Tikhon, without any real remorse.
His editor at The Russian Messenger, Mikhail Katkov, refused to print it, and Dostoevsky cut it rather than lose the whole serialization. The chapter was considered lost for decades until it turned up among his papers in Moscow in 1921, and the first English translation, by S. S. Koteliansky and Virginia Woolf, was published by the Woolfs’ own Hogarth Press in 1922. Most modern English translations, including the Pevear and Volokhonsky and Robert Maguire editions, now restore it, usually as an appendix.
The Constance Garnett translation never did, and because Garnett’s is the version that fell into the public domain and now populates most free ebook sites, a huge number of readers today, myself included on my first pass, finish this novel with a Stavrogin who never fully explains himself, simply because the one chapter built to explain him was never in the copy they were holding.
Comparison with similar works: If you have read The Brothers Karamazov, Kirillov’s monologues will feel like a rough draft of the Grand Inquisitor’s argument, worked out through a single desperate man instead of a parable.
Albert Camus, who read this novel as a study of nihilism’s real-world cost, went on to direct his own stage adaptation of it in 1959 at the Théâtre Antoine, and his later essay The Rebel makes almost the same case in nonfiction form: that a revolution built on pure negation eventually turns on the very people who started it.
Readers who want the argument from the other ideological direction, showing a nihilist theory taken to its personal rather than political extreme, should also look at Dostoevsky’s own Crime and Punishment and its portrait of Raskolnikov.
Adaptation: The Possessed‘s best-known screen version is Andrzej Wajda’s 1988 French film Les Possédés, starring Isabelle Huppert as Marya Shatov, Omar Sharif as Stepan Trofimovitch, and Lambert Wilson as Stavrogin, made on a modest budget of roughly $575,000 and shown in competition at the Berlin Film Festival that year.
Camus’s own 1959 stage adaptation, mounted the year before his death and partly funded with his Nobel Prize money, is arguably the more historically important version, given how directly it fed into his own thinking about revolution and nihilism.
Personal Insight
If there is one lesson from The Possessed that keeps following me around, it is not really about revolution at all. It is about the danger of mistaking a charismatic blank for a leader, since Stavrogin never offers anyone in this book an actual belief, only the shape of one, and people build entire movements and marriages on that shape anyway.
That still describes a real pattern in how online followings and political movements form around figures who say remarkably little of substance.
A second, closely related lesson is Pyotr Verkhovensky’s method of binding a group together through a shared act of guilt, which is the exact structure behind Nechaev’s real 1869 murder and behind the way cults and extremist cells still recruit and hold people today, through complicity rather than conviction.
A third lesson sits in Kirillov, who shows how a private, internally consistent piece of logic, followed with total sincerity and no outside check, can walk a person somewhere no sane person would choose to go, a caution worth remembering anytime a theory starts to feel more real than the people affected by it.
A fourth lesson comes from Stepan Trofimovitch and Pyotr, whose father-son estrangement over politics reads uncomfortably close to family arguments happening across dinner tables right now, in a much more online and much more polarized version.
The fifth lesson is the smallest and the one that started this whole piece: read the edition you are actually holding with some curiosity about what might be missing from it, because in this particular case, an entire chapter’s absence changed how an entire character reads to millions of people, most of whom never knew there was anything to miss.
The Possessed Quotes
I. Prophetic Vision & The Nature of Evil
Chapter 2, Part 1 – Shatov on the Russian People:
“There has never been a nation without a religion, that is, without an idea of good and evil. Every people has its own conception of good and evil, and its own good and evil. When the same conceptions of good and evil become prevalent in several nations, then these nations are dying, and then the very distinction between good and evil is beginning to disappear.”
Chapter 6, Part 2 – Pyotr Stepanovitch’s Revolutionary Vision:
“We’ll set fires going…. We’ll set legends going. Every scurvy ‘group’ will be of use. Out of those very groups I’ll pick you out fellows so keen they’ll not shrink from shooting, and be grateful for the honour of a job, too. Well, and there will be an upheaval! There’s going to be such an upset as the world has never seen before…. Russia will be overwhelmed with darkness, the earth will weep for its old gods…. Well, then we shall bring forward… Ivan the Tsarevitch.”
Chapter 8, Part 2 – Stavrogin’s Confession:
“I’ve tried my strength everywhere. You advised me to do this ‘that I might learn to know myself.’ As long as I was experimenting for myself and for others it seemed infinite, as it has all my life. Before your eyes I endured a blow from your brother; I acknowledged my marriage in public. But to what to apply my strength, that is what I’ve never seen, and do not see now in spite of all your praises in Switzerland, which I believed in.”
II. The Nature of Evil & Fanaticism
Chapter 7, Part 2 – Kirillov on God and Self-Will:
“If God exists, all is His will and from His will I cannot escape. If not, it’s all my will and I am bound to show self-will.”
“I am bound to shoot myself because the highest point of my self-will is to kill myself with my own hands.”
“Man has done nothing but invent God so as to go on living, and not kill himself; that’s the whole of universal history up till now. I am the first one in the whole history of mankind who would not invent God.”
Chapter 5, Part 1 – Stepan Trofimovitch on Stupidity:
“The whole secret of their effect lies in their stupidity… If this stupidity were intentional, pretended and calculated, oh, that would be a stroke of genius! But we must do them justice: they don’t pretend anything. It’s the barest, most simple-hearted, most shallow stupidity.”
“Never has stupidity been so solemnly rewarded, though it has so often deserved it… stupidity is of as much service to humanity as the loftiest genius.”
Chapter 6, Part 2 – Shigalov’s System:
“Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.”
“The division of mankind into two unequal parts. One-tenth enjoys absolute liberty and unbounded power over the other nine-tenths. The others have to give up all individuality and become, so to speak, a herd.”
III. On Love, Suffering & Human Nature
Chapter 7, Part 2 – Stepan Trofimovitch’s Deathbed Words:
“God is necessary to me, if only because He is the only being whom one can love eternally.”
“My immortality is necessary if only because God will not be guilty of injustice and extinguish altogether the flame of love for Him once kindled in my heart. And what is more precious than love? Love is higher than existence, love is the crown of existence.”
“Every minute, every instant of life ought to be a blessing to man… they ought to be, they certainly ought to be! It’s the duty of man to make it so; that’s the law of his nature.”
Chapter 1, Part 3 – Stepan Trofimovitch’s Farewell:
“The one essential condition of human existence is that man should always be able to bow down before something infinitely great. If men are deprived of the infinitely great they will not go on living and will die of despair.”
Chapter 7, Part 2 – The Gospel Reading (Revelation 3:15-17):
“‘I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. Because thou sayest, I am rich and increased with goods, and have need of nothing: and thou knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked.'”
— Stepan Trofimovitch’s response: “Better be cold, better be cold than lukewarm, than only lukewarm.”
IV. The Crisis of Faith & Ideas
Chapter 1, Part 2 – Shatov on Atheism:
“If you cease to understand your own people and lose your connection with them, you lose to the same extent the faith of your fathers, and become atheistic or indifferent.”
“He who has no people has no God.”
Chapter 1, Part 2 – Stavrogin’s Search:
“I’ve done nothing but study her… If you want to conquer the world, conquer yourself.”
“I’ve done nothing but negation, with no greatness of soul, no force. Even negation has not come from me. Everything has always been petty and spiritless.”
Chapter 3, Part 2 – Kirillov’s Ecstasy:
“There are seconds—they come five or six at a time—when you suddenly feel the presence of the eternal harmony perfectly attained… It’s something not earthly… man cannot endure it in his earthly aspect. He must be physically changed or die. This feeling is clear and unmistakable; it’s as though you apprehend all nature and suddenly say, ‘Yes, that’s right.'” —The Possessed quote
V. On Russia & The Russian Soul
Chapter 7, Part 2 – Stepan Trofimovitch’s Apocalyptic Vision:
“That’s exactly like our Russia, those devils that come out of the sick man and enter into the swine. They are all the sores, all the foul contagions, all the impurities, all the devils great and small that have multiplied in that great invalid, our beloved Russia… But a great idea and a great Will will encompass it from on high, as with that lunatic possessed of devils… and all those devils will come forth, all the impurity, all the rottenness that was putrefying on the surface… and they will beg of themselves to enter into swine; and indeed maybe they have entered into them already!” —The Possessed quote
Chapter 1, Part 2 – Shatov on Russian Identity:
“Not a single nation has ever been founded on principles of science or reason… Nations are built up and moved by another force… the force of an insatiable desire to go on to the end, though at the same time it denies that end. It is the force of the persistent assertion of one’s own existence, and a denial of death.”
VI. The Devil’s Epigraph (Pushkin)
“Strike me dead, the track has vanished,
Well, what now? We’ve lost the way,
Demons have bewitched our horses,
Led us in the wilds astray.‘What a number! Whither drift they?
What’s the mournful dirge they sing?
Do they hail a witch’s marriage
Or a goblin’s burying?'”
VII. The Gospel Passage (Luke 8:32-37)
“And there was one herd of many swine feeding on this mountain; and they besought him that he would suffer them to enter into them. And he suffered them.
“Then went the devils out of the man and entered into the swine; and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake and were choked.
“When they that fed them saw what was done, they fled, and went and told it in the city and in the country.
“Then they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus and found the man, out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind; and they were afraid.”
VIII. Isolated Powerful Lines
On Freedom:
“There will be full freedom when it will be just the same to live or not to live. That’s the goal for all.” —The Possessed quote
On Happiness:
“Man is unhappy because he doesn’t know he’s happy. It’s only that. That’s all, that’s all! If anyone finds out he’ll become happy at once, that minute.”
On Beauty:
“Without beauty it is impossible, for there will be nothing left in the world… Even science would not exist a moment without beauty.”
On Death:
“Life’s one thing and that’s another. Life exists, but death doesn’t at all.”
On Power:
“Do you know how powerful a single man may be?”
On Lies:
“The hardest thing in life is to live without telling lies… and without believing in one’s lies.”
On Apathy:
“I can never, never shoot myself.”
The Final Note:
— Nikolay Stavrogin’s suicide note
“No one is to blame, I did it myself.”
Conclusion
I came away from The Possessed thinking of it less as a novel about revolutionaries and more as a novel about what fills the space where belief used to sit, whether that space gets filled with a nation, a theory, or nothing at all.
It asks a lot of patience in its opening third, and it will reward readers of Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov far more than someone picking up Dostoevsky for the first time.
If you already own a copy, especially a free one, it is worth checking whether “At Tikhon’s” made it in, because reading Stavrogin without it is a genuinely different, and I would argue lesser, experience than reading him with it.
Almost a century and a half after Dostoevsky wrote it in direct response to a single murder in Moscow, this remains one of the clearest warnings literature has produced about what happens when people hand their own judgment over to an idea, and I do not think it has dated even slightly.
