The Possessed is regarded the world over as the most shattering vision of nihilism in action to come out of Russia. Despite their different interpretations of radical politics, the young men, Stavrogin and Verhovensky combine fanaticism, treachery, and self-contradiction to incite an entire town to pillage, arson, and slaughter. In this story of misfits who believe in nothing and wish only to destroy, Dostoyevsky is everywhere concerned with the passion man demonstrates for the lie in order to create a chaos that mirrors his tortured soul.
Editorial Review(s)
"Dostoyevsky wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious; that is in reality the reason why his characters seem 'pathological,' while they are only visualized more clearly than any other figures in imaginative literature....He was in the rank in which we set Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe." --Edwin Muir
A New Transaltion by Andre R. MacAndre and Afterword by Marc Slonim
About the Author
![Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "a gifted observer, able to discern the exact details that bring whole worlds into being" and "a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights," A. S. Byatt writes some of the most engaging and skillful novels of our time. Time magazine calls her "a novelist of dazzling inventiveness."
Possession, for which Byatt won England's prestigious Booker Prize, was praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic when it was first published in 1990. "On academic rivalry and obsession, Byatt is delicious. On the nature of possession—the lover by the beloved, the biographer by his subject—she is profound," said The Sunday Times (London). The New Yorker dubbed it "more fun to read than The Name of the Rose . . . Its prankish verve [and] monstrous richness of detail [make for] a one-woman variety show of literary styles and types." The novel traces a pair of young academics—Roland Michell and Maud Bailey—as they uncover a clandestine love affair between two long-dead Victorian poets. Interwoven in a mesmerizing pastiche are love letters and fairytales, extracts from biographies and scholarly accounts, creating a sensuous and utterly delightful novel of ideas and passions.
With an Introduction by the author that describes the novel's origins and its twenty-year gestation, this Modern Library edition is a handsome keepsake for fans of Possession—new and old alike.](https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-ezptpblrxu/images/stencil/500x659/products/1135/1848/PossesionModern__58320.1660081710.jpg?c=2 "Hailed by The New York Times Book Review as \"a gifted observer, able to discern the exact details that bring whole worlds into being\" and \"a storyteller who could keep a sultan on the edge of his throne for a thousand and one nights,\" A. S. Byatt writes some of the most engaging and skillful novels of our time. Time magazine calls her \"a novelist of dazzling inventiveness.\"
Possession, for which Byatt won England's prestigious Booker Prize, was praised by critics on both sides of the Atlantic when it was first published in 1990. \"On academic rivalry and obsession, Byatt is delicious. On the nature of possession—the lover by the beloved, the biographer by his subject—she is profound,\" said The Sunday Times (London). The New Yorker dubbed it \"more fun to read than The Name of the Rose . . . Its prankish verve [and] monstrous richness of detail [make for] a one-woman variety show of literary styles and types.\" The novel traces a pair of young academics—Roland Michell and Maud Bailey—as they uncover a clandestine love affair between two long-dead Victorian poets. Interwoven in a mesmerizing pastiche are love letters and fairytales, extracts from biographies and scholarly accounts, creating a sensuous and utterly delightful novel of ideas and passions.
With an Introduction by the author that describes the novel's origins and its twenty-year gestation, this Modern Library edition is a handsome keepsake for fans of Possession—new and old alike.")