Demons

A masterful translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s rollicking novel that examines the effect of a charismatic but unscrupulous self-styled revolutionary leader on a group of credulous followers—from “the premier Russian-to-English translators of the era” (The New Yorker)

“[Pevear and Volokhonsky] capture the feverishly intense, personal explosions of activity and emotion that manifest themselves in Russian life.”—The New York Times Book Review

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 he emerged with 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 titled 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 English version.