TMoP: The Possessed (novel)

[Glenn Scheper]

Following up Bekah's Demons lead...

	Ha! Dancer? I need a stenographer!

	Bio:

Dostoevsky was heartbroken, but soon met Anna Snitkina, a 20-year-old 
stenographer whom he married in 1867. With her help Dostoevsky wrote some of the 
greatest novels ever written,
  -- http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Fyodor_Dostoevsky
  Dostoevsky, Fyodor



The book has five primary ideological characters: Verkhovensky, Shatov, 
Stavrogin, Stepan Trofimovich, and Kirilov. Through their philosophies, 
Dostoevsky describes the political chaos seen in 19th-Century Russia.

...a commentary on the real-life murder in 1869 by the socialist revolutionary 
group ("People's Vengeance") of one of its own members (Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov). 
The character Pyotr Verkhovensky is based upon the leader of this revolutionary 
group, Sergey Nechayev, who was found guilty of this murder. Sergey Nechayev was 
a close confidant of Mikhail Bakunin who had direct influence over both Nechayev 
and the "People's Vengeance".
  -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Possessed_(novel)
  The Possessed (novel) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



Most readers probably know that the character of the amoral nihilist Peter 
Verkhovensky is based--not too loosely, either--on the real-life figure of 
Sergei Nechayev (pronounced neech-aye-eff), who collaborated with the anarchist 
Bakunin while they were both hiding out in Western Europe. (Bakunin finally 
learned that Nechayev was a total fanatic who'd stop at nothing--even blackmail, 
betrayal, and murder--and disassociated himself with Nechayev, warning friends 
against him.) Nechayev murdered a member of his conspiratorial group, suspecting 
the victim of betrayal, a scene portrayed in the novel. What most readers may 
not know is that Lenin was fascinated with the career of Nechayev (who was 
eventually caught for the murder and extradited to Russia, where he died in 
prison), called him a "titanic revolutionary," and said that Bolsheviks should 
try to find everything Nechayev had ever written, and study it. Dostoevsky knew 
he'd be called a "reactionary" for implying that such ends-justify-means 
fanaticism--terror and immorality in the name of a "better world" to come--must 
end in utter destruction.
  -- http://www.amazon.com/review/product/0140440356?showViewpoints=1
  Amazon.com: Customer Reviews: The Devils: The Possessed (Penguin Classics)



The rest of clips are from a good lengthy recap of its 700 pages, here:

  -- http://www.usfca.edu/~southerr/tragic.html
  JOYCE CAROL OATES : TRAGIC RITES IN DOSTOEVSKY'S THE POSSESSED

The son of the province's most wealthy landowner has contracted a marriage in 
jest, it would seem, after a night of drinking-with a woman of the very lowest 
social order, who is both lame and demented.

In a delirium Raskolnikov dreams that the world is condemned to a new plague 
from Asia, and that everyone is to be destroyed except a very few. The disease 
attacks men by way of their sanity: though mad, each believes that he alone has 
the truth and is estranged from his fellows.

	I can relate to that.


	1 4 OBA:

(Why, one wonders, do people so readily assume that a large, ambitious work is 
necessarily any less subtle than a very short work? D. H. Lawrence's Ursula 
says, "A mouse isn't any more subtle than a lion, is it?")

It is in the enigmatic figure of Stavrogin that warring elements meet. Nearly 
everyone in the novel, male or female, looks to Stavrogin for guidance or 
inspiration or strength or emotional support; it is bitterly ironic that he is 
the means by which they are "possessed" while he himself remains untouched-in 
the words of Revelation which are read aloud by Tikhon in one episode (to 
Stavrogin) and by the Gospel woman in another (to Stepan Verkhovensky), he is 
neither hot nor cold but lukewarm. A demonic frenzy is loosed about him and 
through him, yet Stavrogin is dying of boredom. Like Raskolnikov in his cramped 
cell of a room, Stavrogin, though he wanders through Europe, though he makes a 
pilgrimage to Mount Athos, and visits Egypt, and even Iceland, goes nowhere at 
all: he is suffocating, doomed, trapped in the claustrophobia of a person who 
cannot love.

Shatov, who also loves him, and who speaks to him with the blunt angry 
familiarity of a brother, accuses him of having married Maria Lebyatkin 
precisely because the senselessness and the disgrace of it bordered on "genius." 
Stavrogin, like Mitya Karamazov, does not content himself with teetering on the 
brink of the abyss-he plunges into it headfirst. Shatov says in disgust: "You 
married her to satisfy your passion for cruelty, your passion for remorse; you 
went through it for the mental sensuality.

Drawn to the child Matryosha, or perhaps only to the keen, disturbing sensations 
he feels in her presence, Stavrogin either rapes or seduces her, and afterward 
treats her with indifference. The intense excitement he has felt passes; he 
doesn't even hate her any longer; she too bores him. Quite deliberately he 
allows her to hang herself.

	Is this by chance, our Pavel?

It is Kirilov, the only shadow-self of Stavrogin to commit suicide, who has been 
making a study of the increasing incidence of suicides in Russia. Like most of 
the principal characters he has been abroad for several years, and has avoided 
people; it is thought that he has become somewhat alienated from his homeland. 
The narrator considers him insane, but Stavrogin takes him seriously, and his 
preoccupation with God-"God has tormented me all my life," he says-seems to be 
Dostoyevsky's own. In brief, Kirilov thinks of himself as a redeemer: his will 
be the first suicide in history to be committed for no purpose other than that 
of establishing man's free will (and the non-existence of the "old" God).

He tells Stavrogin and Shatov that he is, in fact, very happy, as a consequence 
of experiencing certain "eternal moments" that obliterate all disharmony. Like 
Prince Myshkin (and Dostoyevsky himself), Kirilov is subject to ineffable 
"mystical" visions of the sort that sometimes precede an epileptic fit, though 
not necessarily; these visions have the power to reorganize the personality and 
to cleanse perception in such a way that the individual's ego is destroyed, 
Kirilov explains:

	Well, I guess!

3. Sergy Nechayev, a twenty-two-year-old disciple of Bakunin and a former 
divinity student, organized student disturbances at the Petersburg University in 
1868 and 1869. After having organized a "Society of National Retribution" in 
Moscow, as a part of the World Revolutionary Movement, he and four members of a 
"group of five" murdered the fifth member in a way that closely parallels 
Shatov's death at the hands of the Five. The case was of course a sensational 
one that interested Dostoyevsky greatly; according to David Magarshack, who did 
a translation of The Possessed (under the title The Devils) for Penguin Books, 
Dostoyevsky even found the model for Kirilov among Nechayev's followers.
  -- http://www.usfca.edu/~southerr/tragic.html
  JOYCE CAROL OATES : TRAGIC RITES IN DOSTOEVSKY'S THE POSSESSED

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
Copyleft(!) Forward freely.