The Possessed

In a quiet provincial Russian town, the elderly liberal Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky lives on the generosity of his patroness, Varvara Petrovna, and talks grandly about ideas. Then his son Pyotr arrives, planning to build a secret revolutionary cell and spread chaos, and with him returns Varvara's son Nikolai Stavrogin, a handsome, magnetic and empty aristocrat whom everyone around him, believers and nihilists alike, sees as a leader. Gossip, fires, murder and suicide follow.

Fyodor Dostoevsky based the plot on a real case of 1869, when the revolutionary Sergei Nechayev and his followers murdered a student in Moscow. Published in 1871 and 1872, and also translated as Demons or The Devils, it is both a dark comedy and a prophetic warning about political fanaticism. Read Crime and Punishment first, and see his life.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was sentenced to death in 1849 for his part in a radical circle, reprieved at the last moment and sent to hard labour in Siberia, which he described in The House of the Dead.

His great novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, turn questions of guilt, faith and freedom into stories; White Nights is a gentle place to start.