Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Written in 1864, this novel is the first and strangest of Dostoevsky's masterpieces--and the source of those that followed. Violating literary conventions in ways never before attempted, this classic tells of a mid-19th-century Russian official's breakaway from society and descent "underground."

After fifteen years of treatment for epilepsy in a Swiss institution, Prince Mishkin returns to St. Petersburg to find a jaded mid-19th century social world. At first the kindly, almost childlike prince is taken for an idiot. But the two most beautiful women in town are soon competing for his affections in a duel that grows increasingly dangerous.

A new translation of The Possessed and a new title to go with it. The translators claim it better reflects the spirit of what basically is a novel of ideas, the demons of the title being the Western imports of idealism, socialism, materialism, nihilism, atheism and so on.

Nineteen-year-old Arkady Dolgoruky, the illegitimate son of a landowner, has difficulty establishing his personal identity amid the political and social upheavels of nineteenth-century Russia, in a new translation of a novel by the author of Crime and Punishment.