Demons

Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horrified Russia in 1869, Fyodor 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 emerged 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 erroneously translated as The Possessed) is a blistering comedy of ideas run amok. And like all of Dostoevsky's novels, it is also a riot of literary voices, whose profusion, energy and variety are rendered wonderfully in this new English version. --back cover