It is, despite its dangerous closeness to melodrama and bad taste, one of the most captivating and thrilling tales of modern literature. 1994 – Richard Pevear and Larissa VolokhonskyĪs a 150-year-old political novel, is Demons still worth reading today?įrom the Afterword by Marc Slonim (1962): “The Possessed is not only a novel about revolution, crime, atheism, religion, strong men, underground men, and the Russian past and present.You’ve got five in-print English translations to choose from, seven in total.

The complete novel was published in Russian in 1873. In more ways than one, I can say that it has enriched and shaped me.’” Demons: translations in Englishĭemons was serialized in Russian from 1871 to December 1872. In the program handed out at the theater that night, Camus described the novel’s importance: ‘ Les Possédés is one of the four or five works that I rank above all others. The play premiered on Januat the Théâtre Antoine in Paris…. “The themes explored in The Possessed were so absorbing to Camus that in 1959 he published a three-act stage adaptation, Les Possédés. Open Culture: “Albert Camus Talks About Nihilism & Adapting Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed for the Theatre, 1959” by Mike Springer Demons not only tells us about scandals and catastrophes, and shows them to us it uses its whole structure to carry us through irony, then anger, then into the experience of being manipulated towards madness…. In the nineteenth century, Dostoyevsky and other Russians were inventing a third kind of novel, one that also made the reader experience what is happening. It is often said that there are two kinds of novel, those that tell the reader what is happening, and those that show the reader what is happening. Belknap says in his introduction: “From its title to its final sentence, this novel deals with insanity…. So, you want to read Dostoevsky’s darkest and most hilarious novel, a controversial political satire, the title of which has been variously rendered as The Possessed, The Devils, Devils, and Demons? By all accounts, it’s intense! Which English translation of Demons should I read?

Demons dostoevsky review