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Title: The Possessed

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Constance Garnett - translator

Narrator: Constantine Gregory

Format: Unabridged

Length: 27 hrs and 25 mins

Language: English

Release date: 11-18-17

Publisher: Naxos AudioBooks

Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 4 votes

Genres: Classics, European Literature

Publisher's Summary:

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 Stepanovich Verkhovensky, 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 50 years later. Funny, shocking, and tragic, it is a profound and affecting work with deep philosophical discourses about God, human freedom and political revolution.

Translation by Constance Garnett; appendix translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Virginia Woolf.

Members Reviews:

Womderful

Ive tried for years to read this novel but was never able to get through it. There are several dozen characters - more even than usual for Dostoevsky (I think) - and the Russian names, always a daunting task to keep straight, are overwhelming. The novel takes a very long time introducing the characters and setting up the main action. to get started.

Constantine Gregorys reading (of Constance Garnetts translation) somehow made most of those problems go away. I had the benefit of my list of names from previous attempts, and maybe that helped. The main story still takes awhile to get moving, but Gregory infuses both narration and dialogue with a liveliness and humor that had escaped me earlier. Some of the scenes that confused me earlier now seem hilariously over the top - in a good way.

Many of the characters suffer from a claustrophobic self-consciousness - practically a trademark of Dostoevskys. The narrator is a little odd, partly in and partly out of the action: a member of the community, a friend of Stepan Verkovensky, but sometimes omniscient, and possibly unreliable. Three men in particular dominate the action: Stepan Verkovensky, an aging writer, philosopher, and poseur; his son Pyotr; and Pyotrs cohort and erstwhile friend Nikolai Stavrogin, an aristocrat whose actions always tend toward the unexpected.

Pyotr Verkovensky is a particularly complex and nasty character. He babbles on endlessly, in the most obnoxious way; yet in his babbling he manages to brutally insult his father, threaten Nikolai Stavrogin, and humiliate the local governor, who claims an awareness of his subversive activities. While he turns out NOT to be the main character, Pyotr is in fact the man who sets most of the action in motion. That action expands to include several murders, arson, a woman beaten to death by a mob, a duel, and several suicides. Its all in the service of misguided youthful nihilism.

There is an appendix, which is difficult to listen to but should not be skipped. Its a chapter that Dostoevsky was forced by his publisher to omit because it describes a descent into horror, on the part of Stavrogin, that is no less horrible for its omission of any explicit detail. Dostoevsky was right that its essential to an understanding of Stavrogins character - thief, poisoner, and child rapist that he is.