The Possessed: Or, the Devils

In a provincial Russian town teetering on the edge of chaos, a charismatic young man named Nikolay Stavrogin returns from Petersburg to find his world poison. His former tutor, the nihilist Peter Verhovensky, has been assembling a cadre of revolutionaries, each one possessed by their own ideological demons. Shatov, a former radical, struggles between faith and despair. Kirillov believes man must prove his freedom through suicide. And the old invalid Shatova waits for something terrible to unfold. When a murder is committed in the name of the cause, the true nature of their 'possession' is revealed. Written in the aftermath of a real political assassination that horrified 1869 Russia, Dostoevsky's masterpiece crackles with prophetic fury. It is a terrifyingly funny, deeply disturbing portrait of how ideology can hollow out a soul and how revolution can become its own kind of religion. This is the novel that predicted the 20th century's totalitarian nightmares before they happened.