Two Novels By Dostoevsky: Devils and The Idiot

These two novels, written one after the other in the late 1860s and early 1870s, are Fyodor Dostoevsky’s most emotional and riveting fiction. The Idiot tells the story of the saintly Prince Myshkin, a man too good for the world who is taken advantage of by the people around him. Far from being a fool, he is somebody who causes people to question their routine assumptions and values. Devils (also translated into English as The Possessed and Demons ) concerns the origins of modern revolutionary terrorism and its amorality and vindictiveness, seen especially in the predatory and menacing Nikolai Stavrogin. Both books feature some of the great comic creations (Lebedev in The Idiot , the senior Verkhovenesky in Demons ) in the entire history of the European novel. The sheer variety of character, incident, and feeling in these books  vividly illuminates its cultural and historical context and becomes applicable to numerous other situations beyond the time and place in which the books were conceived.

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