



Produced by David Moynihan, David Widger and Michelle Knight





THE POSSESSED (The Devils)

A Novel In Three Parts

By Fyodor Dostoevsky

Translated From The Russian By Constance Garnett



CONTENTS:

     * PART I
     * CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY
     * CHAPTER II. PRINCE HARRY. MATCHMAKING.
     * CHAPTER III. THE SINS OF OTHERS
     * CHAPTER IV. THE <DW36>
     * CHAPTER V. THE SUBTLE SERPENT

     * PART II
     * CHAPTER I. NIGHT
     * CHAPTER II. NIGHT (continued)
     * CHAPTER III. THE DUEL
     * CHAPTER IV. ALL IN EXPECTATION
     * CHAPTER V. ON THE EVE OF THE FETE
     * CHAPTER VI. PYOTR STEPANOVITCH IS BUSY
     * CHAPTER VII. A MEETING
     * CHAPTER VIII. IVAN THE TSAREVITCH
     * CHAPTER IX. A RAID AT STEFAN TROFIMOVITCH'S
     * CHAPTER X. FILIBUSTERS. A FATAL MORNING

     * PART III
     * CHAPTER I. THE FETE--FIRST PART
     * CHAPTER II. THE END OF THE FETE
     * CHAPTER III. A ROMANCE ENDED
     * CHAPTER IV. THE LAST RESOLUTION
     * CHAPTER V. A WANDERER
     * CHAPTER VI. A BUSY NIGHT
     * CHAPTER VII. STEPAN TROFIMOVITCH'S LAST WANDERING
     * CHAPTER VIII. CONCLUSION





1916

     "Strike me dead, the track has vanished,
     Well, what now? We've lost the way,
     Demons have bewitched our horses,
     Led us in the wilds astray.

     "What a number! Whither drift they?
     What's the mournful dirge they sing?
     Do they hail a witch's marriage
     Or a goblin's burying?"

     A. Pushkin.


     "And there was one herd of many swine feeding on this
     mountain; and they besought him that he would suffer them to
     enter into them. And he suffered them.

     "Then went the devils out of the man and entered into the
     swine; and the herd ran violently down a steep place into
     the lake and were choked.

     "When they that fed them saw what was done, they fled, and
     went and told it in the city and in the country.

     "Then they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus
     and found the man, out of whom the devils were departed,
     sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind;
     and they were afraid."

     Luke, ch. viii. 32-37.





PART I




CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY

SOME DETAILS OF THE BIOGRAPHY OF THAT HIGHLY RESPECTED GENTLEMAN STEPAN
TROFIMOVITCH VERHOVENSKY.

IN UNDERTAKING to describe the recent and strange incidents in our town,
till lately wrapped in uneventful obscurity, I find myself forced in
absence of literary skill to begin my story rather far back, that is
to say, with certain biographical details concerning that talented and
highly-esteemed gentleman, Stepan Trofimovitch Verhovensky. I trust that
these details may at least serve as an introduction, while my projected
story itself will come later.

I will say at once that Stepan Trofimovitch had always filled a
particular role among us, that of the progressive patriot, so to say,
and he was passionately fond of playing the part--so much so that I
really believe he could not have existed without it. Not that I would
put him on a level with an actor at a theatre, God forbid, for I really
have a respect for him. This may all have been the effect of habit, or
rather, more exactly of a generous propensity he had from his earliest
years for indulging in an agreeable day-dream in which he figured as
a picturesque public character. He fondly loved, for instance, his
position as a "persecuted" man and, so to speak, an "exile." There is a
sort of traditional glamour about those two little words that fascinated
him once for all and, exalting him gradually in his own opinion, raised
him in the course of years to a lofty pedestal very gratifying to
vanity. In an English satire of the last century, Gulliver, returning
from the land of the Lilliputians where the people were only three or
four inches high, had grown so accustomed to consider himself a giant
among them, that as he walked along the streets of London he could not
help crying out to carriages and passers-by to be careful and get out of
his way for fear he should crush them, imagining that they were little
and he was still a giant. He was laughed at and abused for it, and rough
coachmen even lashed at the giant with their whips. But was that just?
What may not be done by habit? Habit had brought Stepan Trofimovitch
almost to the same position, but in a more innocent and inoffensive
form, if one may use such expressions, for he was a most excellent man.

I am even inclined to suppose that towards the end he had been entirely
forgotten everywhere; but still it cannot be said that his name had
never been known. It is beyond question that he had at one time belonged
to a certain distinguished constellation of celebrated leaders of
the last generation, and at one time--though only for the briefest
moment--his name was pronounced by many hasty persons of that day almost
as though it were on a level with the names of Tchaadaev, of Byelinsky,
of Granovsky, and of Herzen, who had only just begun to write abroad.
But Stepan Trofimovitch's activity ceased almost at the moment it began,
owing, so to say, to a "vortex of combined circumstances." And would you
believe it? It turned out afterwards that there had been no "vortex" and
even no "circumstances," at least in that connection. I only learned
the other day to my intense amazement, though on the most unimpeachable
authority, that Stepan Trofimovitch had lived among us in our province
not as an "exile" as we were accustomed to believe, and had never even
been under police supervision at all. Such is the force of imagination!
All his life he sincerely believed that in certain spheres he was a
constant cause of apprehension, that every step he took was watched
and noted, and that each one of the three governors who succeeded one
another during twenty years in our province came with special and uneasy
ideas concerning him, which had, by higher powers, been impressed upon
each before everything else, on receiving the appointment. Had anyone
assured the honest man on the most irrefutable grounds that he had
nothing to be afraid of, he would certainly have been offended. Yet
Stepan Trofimovitch was a most intelligent and gifted man, even, so to
say, a man of science, though indeed, in science... well, in fact he
had not done such great things in science. I believe indeed he had done
nothing at all. But that's very often the case, of course, with men of
science among us in Russia.

He came back from abroad and was brilliant in the capacity of lecturer
at the university, towards the end of the forties. He only had time
to deliver a few lectures, I believe they were about the Arabs; he
maintained, too, a brilliant thesis on the political and Hanseatic
importance of the German town Hanau, of which there was promise in the
epoch between 1413 and 1428, and on the special and obscure reasons
why that promise was never fulfilled. This dissertation was a cruel
and skilful thrust at the Slavophils of the day, and at once made him
numerous and irreconcilable enemies among them. Later on--after he had
lost his post as lecturer, however--he published (by way of revenge,
so to say, and to show them what a man they had lost) in a progressive
monthly review, which translated Dickens and advocated the views of
George Sand, the beginning of a very profound investigation into the
causes, I believe, of the extraordinary moral nobility of certain
knights at a certain epoch or something of that nature.

Some lofty and exceptionally noble idea was maintained in it, anyway.
It was said afterwards that the continuation was hurriedly forbidden and
even that the progressive review had to suffer for having printed the
first part. That may very well have been so, for what was not possible
in those days? Though, in this case, it is more likely that there
was nothing of the kind, and that the author himself was too lazy to
conclude his essay. He cut short his lectures on the Arabs because,
somehow and by someone (probably one of his reactionary enemies) a
letter had been seized giving an account of certain circumstances, in
consequence of which someone had demanded an explanation from him. I
don't know whether the story is true, but it was asserted that at the
same time there was discovered in Petersburg a vast, unnatural, and
illegal conspiracy of thirty people which almost shook society to its
foundations. It was said that they were positively on the point of
translating Fourier. As though of design a poem of Stepan Trofimovitch's
was seized in Moscow at that very time, though it had been written six
years before in Berlin in his earliest youth, and manuscript copies had
been passed round a circle consisting of two poetical amateurs and one
student. This poem is lying now on my table. No longer ago than last
year I received a recent copy in his own handwriting from Stepan
Trofimovitch himself, signed by him, and bound in a splendid red leather
binding. It is not without poetic merit, however, and even a certain
talent. It's strange, but in those days (or to be more exact, in the
thirties) people were constantly composing in that style. I find it
difficult to describe the subject, for I really do not understand it.
It is some sort of an allegory in lyrical-dramatic form, recalling the
second part of Faust. The scene opens with a chorus of women, followed
by a chorus of men, then a chorus of incorporeal powers of some sort,
and at the end of all a chorus of spirits not yet living but very
eager to come to life. All these choruses sing about something very
indefinite, for the most part about somebody's curse, but with a tinge
of the higher humour. But the scene is suddenly changed. There begins a
sort of "festival of life" at which even insects sing, a tortoise
comes on the scene with certain sacramental Latin words, and even, if
I remember aright, a mineral sings about something that is a quite
inanimate object. In fact, they all sing continually, or if they
converse, it is simply to abuse one another vaguely, but again with
a tinge of higher meaning. At last the scene is changed again; a
wilderness appears, and among the rocks there wanders a civilized young
man who picks and sucks certain herbs. Asked by a fairy why he sucks
these herbs, he answers that, conscious of a superfluity of life in
himself, he seeks forgetfulness, and finds it in the juice of these
herbs, but that his great desire is to lose his reason at once (a desire
possibly superfluous). Then a youth of indescribable beauty rides in on
a black steed, and an immense multitude of all nations follow him.
The youth represents death, for whom all the peoples are yearning. And
finally, in the last scene we are suddenly shown the Tower of Babel, and
certain athletes at last finish building it with a song of new hope, and
when at length they complete the topmost pinnacle, the lord (of Olympia,
let us say) takes flight in a comic fashion, and man, grasping the
situation and seizing his place, at once begins a new life with new
insight into things. Well, this poem was thought at that time to be
dangerous. Last year I proposed to Stepan Trofimovitch to publish it,
on the ground of its perfect harmlessness nowadays, but he declined
the suggestion with evident dissatisfaction. My view of its complete
harmlessness evidently displeased him, and I even ascribe to it a
certain coldness on his part, which lasted two whole months.

And what do you think? Suddenly, almost at the time I proposed printing
it here, our poem was published abroad in a collection of revolutionary
verse, without the knowledge of Stepan Trofimovitch. He was at
first alarmed, rushed to the governor, and wrote a noble letter in
self-defence to Petersburg. He read it to me twice, but did not send
it, not knowing to whom to address it. In fact he was in a state of
agitation for a whole month, but I am convinced that in the secret
recesses of his heart he was enormously flattered. He almost took the
copy of the collection to bed with him, and kept it hidden under his
mattress in the daytime; he positively would not allow the women to turn
his bed, and although he expected every day a telegram, he held his head
high. No telegram came. Then he made friends with me again, which is a
proof of the extreme kindness of his gentle and unresentful heart.


II

Of course I don't assert that he had never suffered for his convictions
at all, but I am fully convinced that he might have gone on lecturing
on his Arabs as long as he liked, if he had only given the necessary
explanations. But he was too lofty, and he proceeded with peculiar haste
to assure himself that his career was ruined forever "by the vortex of
circumstance." And if the whole truth is to be told the real cause of
the change in his career was the very delicate proposition which had
been made before and was then renewed by Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin, a
lady of great wealth, the wife of a lieutenant-general, that he should
undertake the education and the whole intellectual development of her
only son in the capacity of a superior sort of teacher and friend, to
say nothing of a magnificent salary. This proposal had been made to
him the first time in Berlin, at the moment when he was first left a
widower. His first wife was a frivolous girl from our province, whom he
married in his early and unthinking youth, and apparently he had had a
great deal of trouble with this young person, charming as she was,
owing to the lack of means for her support; and also from other, more
delicate, reasons. She died in Paris after three years' separation
from him, leaving him a son of five years old; "the fruit of our first,
joyous, and unclouded love," were the words the sorrowing father once
let fall in my presence.

The child had, from the first, been sent back to Russia, where he was
brought up in the charge of distant cousins in some remote region.
Stepan Trofimovitch had declined Varvara Petrovna's proposal on that
occasion and had quickly married again, before the year was over, a
taciturn Berlin girl, and, what makes it more strange, there was no
particular necessity for him to do so. But apart from his marriage there
were, it appears, other reasons for his declining the situation. He was
tempted by the resounding fame of a professor, celebrated at that time,
and he, in his turn, hastened to the lecturer's chair for which he had
been preparing himself, to try his eagle wings in flight. But now with
singed wings he naturally remembered the proposition which even then had
made him hesitate. The sudden death of his second wife, who did not live
a year with him, settled the matter decisively. To put it plainly it was
all brought about by the passionate sympathy and priceless, so to
speak, classic friendship of Varvara Petrovna, if one may use such
an expression of friendship. He flung himself into the arms of this
friendship, and his position was settled for more than twenty years. I
use the expression "flung himself into the arms of," but God forbid that
anyone should fly to idle and superfluous conclusions. These embraces
must be understood only in the most loftily moral sense. The most
refined and delicate tie united these two beings, both so remarkable,
forever.

The post of tutor was the more readily accepted too, as the property--a
very small one--left to Stepan Trofimovitch by his first wife was close
to Skvoreshniki, the Stavrogins' magnificent estate on the outskirts of
our provincial town. Besides, in the stillness of his study, far from
the immense burden of university work, it was always possible to devote
himself to the service of science, and to enrich the literature of his
country with erudite studies. These works did not appear. But on the
other hand it did appear possible to spend the rest of his life, more
than twenty years, "a reproach incarnate," so to speak, to his native
country, in the words of a popular poet:

_Reproach incarnate thou didst stand_
_Erect before thy Fatherland,_
_O Liberal idealist!_

But the person to whom the popular poet referred may perhaps have had
the right to adopt that pose for the rest of his life if he had wished
to do so, though it must have been tedious. Our Stepan Trofimovitch was,
to tell the truth, only an imitator compared with such people; moreover,
he had grown weary of standing erect and often lay down for a while.
But, to do him justice, the "incarnation of reproach" was preserved even
in the recumbent attitude, the more so as that was quite sufficient for
the province. You should have seen him at our club when he sat down to
cards. His whole figure seemed to exclaim "Cards! Me sit down to whist
with you! Is it consistent? Who is responsible for it? Who has shattered
my energies and turned them to whist? Ah, perish, Russia!" and he would
majestically trump with a heart.

And to tell the truth he dearly loved a game of cards, which led him,
especially in later years,