Audio CD

English language

Published Feb. 26, 2018 by Naxos Audiobooks.

ISBN:
978-1-78198-100-9
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4 stars (18 reviews)

Also known as Demons, The Possessed is a powerful socio-political novel about revolutionary ideas and the radicals behind them. It follows the career of Pyotr Stepanovitch Verhovensky, a political terrorist who leads a group of Nihilists on a demonic quest for societal breakdown. They are consumed by their desires and ideals, and have surrendered themselves fully to the darkness of their ‘demons’. This possession leads them to engulf a quiet provincial town and subject it to a storm of violence. Inspired by a real political killing in 1869, the book is an impassioned response to the ideologies of European liberalism and nihilism, which threatened Russian Orthodoxy; it eerily predicted the Russian Revolution, which would take place fifty years later. Funny, shocking and tragic, it is a profound and affecting work with deep philosophical discourses about God, human freedom and political revolution. This edition contains the original banned Chapter Nine, translated …

65 editions

reviewed Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Dover Thrift Editions)

Review of 'Demons' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

5/5

I've read and reread this book countless times, anytime I start this and take over 2 days of a break from it I feel compelled to start from the top again.

Very few books do you come across where the writer takes events from life (or whatever fictional setting they've conjured up) and put them onto paper without doing nothing more than narrating these events in their own style and calling it a day. The most brilliant thing about this book is how naturally Dostoevsky swaps from different communication styles from character to character. Arguably this is something he does throughout all his works but it is much more pronounced in demons and especiallythis translation (Pevear & Volokhonsky's).

The book has always been on of my favourites—if
not, my favourite—out of Dostoevsky's corpus. It's not that this story is the most enticing or most unique of his works, …

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