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by Moe Zilla

Dostoevsky had a message. He wanted to show that Russia was being destroyed by its radicals. In 1872 he penned a novel called "The Possessed" showing a village's intellectuals as flawed and spiritual failures. But he inadvertently created a very compelling novel.

As Tom Wolfe once observed, Dostoevsky couldn't make his ideas dominate his characters. He'd been intent on fictionalizing the real-life murder of a revolutionary by other members of their group.

Into this story he folded Nikolai Stavrogin, a character enduring a tragically failed romance that Dostoevsky originally meant for another novel. Like most of his novels, there's a large and complex set of characters highlighting different aspects of his story. A century later Joyce Carol Oates would say the resulting novel was one of Dostoevsky's most confused - and one of his most violent.

Stavrogin meets his life love one more time, only to see her killed by an angry mob. A murder has been committed in town by the revolutionaries, along with a conspiracy to conceal its perpetrator. The book's intellectual characters struggles in various ways to understand the world around them - but the real horror they're confronting is amorality. A troubled local woman even admits that she's drowned her own baby in the lake.

The book was titled "The Possessed" by its translators, though literary scholars now suggest a different interpretation. The best English word for Dostoevsky's Russian title would be "the possessors," they argue, since he'd meant the radicals to represent the biblical demons cast out by Jesus. (Another suggested translation is simply "The Demons.") Dostoevsky reportedly feared he wouldn't convey the full beauty that he saw in this idea. But as the novel progresses, his intricate characters still find time to discuss their opposing religious beliefs.

"Absolute atheism is very, very close to...absolute faith," one character is warned. But a military officer takes a more pragmatic approach to the question. "If there is no god, then how am I a captain?" The czar rules Russia because he inherited the throne, a practice justified by saying it was the will of God. But if the ranks in the Czar's army are bestowed with the same authority, it becomes a series of dominos. Would the legitimacy of Russia's army vanish in the absence of a divine will?

One character remarks prophetically that "It is a good question...."

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