Sometime in June of 1972, a few weeks after my 16th birthday, I purchased a copy of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed in a bookstore a few blocks away from my house in Flushing, Queens, New York.
I was already a voracious reader when I picked up The Possessed, but also a rather indiscriminate one. In the months and years before June 1972 I remember reading things like the adventure novels of Alaistair MacLean and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I read a lot of science fiction—H.P. Lovecraft was a favorite. I’d also read a biography of Houdini, and waded through the unsavory murk of The Boston Strangler (which I think had a tie-in to the movie starring Tony Curtis). When I started reading The Possessed, I was about halfway through A Canticle for Liebowitz, a well-regarded dystopian science fiction novel. I never returned to Liebowitz—it’s the Wally Pipp of my bookshelf.
I still have my original copy of The Possessed, a Signet Classic ($1.25). The cover shows stiff, shadowy figures in blue and green suggestive of a Russian icon or of a stained-glass window. In those early days I felt attached as much to the books as physical objects as to the words inside—cover pictures, typeface, even the feel of the pages. This is still true to some extent—a book to me is more than just words. This is why I could never warm up to the idea of a Kindle (though I do now own one, which is another story).
I loved the cover of my Penguin Crime and Punishment, with its outline of two characters facing each other, silhouetted dark blue against a black background. What books made me feel all those years ago comes back to me immediately when I look at their covers. Which is why I have trouble whittling down my collection of mouldering paperbacks.
When I decided to re-read The Possessed for the first time in almost 40 years, I didn’t think the old paperback would hold up, so I decided to read a new translation, by the celebrated husband/wife translation team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The book has a new title now—Demons. Apparently it has something to do with the fact that the sinister characters in the book are doing the possessing in addition to (or perhaps instead of?) being themselves possessed.
The first 200 pages are a bit of a slog—lots of characters, lots of names, oblique references to things that happened in Switzerland before the beginning of the current action. (An aside: I read recently about somebody who had the idea of replacing the names of characters in Russian novels with the names of current celebrities, so that instead of Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky and Varvara Ivanovna Stavrogin you could have—Charlie Sheen and Miley Cyrus. It might work.)
Anyway, after about page 200, things start to pick up. Dostoyevsky novels are constructed almost exclusively from accounts of the activities of people in highly stimulated and distressed states of consciousness. There must be 10 different characters in The Possessed who experience an excruciating and overwhelming crisis of some sort of another. Two commit suicide. Events transpire to bring windfalls of anguish to characters, often to several characters simultaneously.
But the presentation is as neat and clear as the action is chaotic. The characters in The Possessed are portrayed with both sympathy and psychological insight. Imagine if half a dozen tragic heroes from Shakespeare had to share the same stage—Othello and King Lear and Macbeth all inhabiting a single provincial town and mixing their miseries and manias.
I think in 1972 I was thrilled by the sheer emotional heat of The Possessed. It was like standing in front of an open oven door. It was the first time I was really transported by a book, and I proceeded to blow through a dozen other fat Russian novels as well as every other kind of “classic” I could find. No more sci-fi, no more Alaistair MacLean.
As any introduction or synopsis can tell you, the characters in The Possessed embody various political and philosophical trends in 1870s Russia. Some are based on actual troublemakers or agents provocateur. It seems that revolutionary politics in Russia has always been plagued by cynics, opportunists, and just plain nasty people. Nihilists. I imagine that Dostoyevsky would select for this kind of revolutionary, given his religious and conservative orientation, but still I wonder why it is that that country gets Lenins and Stalins instead of Washingtons and Jeffersons.
This political dimension of The Possessed is more apparent to me now than it was 40 years ago, but it’s still largely beside the point as far as what I get from reading the book.
The episode that made the strongest impression this time is where the character Shatov, a noble but inarticulate idealist who has fallen in with a gang of violent revolutionaries, is suddenly reunited with his wife, whom he has not seen in years and with whom he had only lived once, for a couple of weeks. She is pregnant with another man’s child and goes into labor in the tiny dark cramped apartment where Shatov lives. Shatov is overwhelmed with gratitude and tenderness for this long-lost wife, and she in turn is overcome with joy at the evidence of his devotion. Shatov goes out to summon the town midwife, who as it happens is married to one of the conspirators who have resolved the next night to murder Shatov. I wonder if on first reading I thought there was any hope for Shatov at this point—any chance that he could escape the tightening noose of his fate, as he goes through his day with his newly kindled hope? This time, though I had no recollection of this specific episode, I knew there was no hope. That’s not how things work in Dostoyevsky novels. Dostoyevsky describes the ensuing 24 hours meticulously—the calm efficiency of the midwife, the careful preparations of the conspirators, Shatov’s solicitude. The night comes and Shatov is duly murdered. Afterwards his wife and child die as well—from disease, exposure, hunger.
So anyway, I have to admit that I wasn’t able to rekindle the excitement I felt when I first read this book. I can understand why it excited me, but I don’t feel that excitement all over again. It was a good read and a profound and moving story, but this time, it didn’t change my life. No drug like a new drug.
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