Everyman's Library #182: Demons

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

The award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky continue their acclaimed series of Dostoevsky translations with this novel, also known as The Possessed.

Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horrified Russians in 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a “novel-pamphlet” in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What emerged was a prophetic and ferociously funny masterpiece of ideology and murder in pre-revolutionary Russia–a novel that is rivaled only by The Brothers Karamazov as Dostoevsky’s greatest.

Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horrified Russians in 1869, Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a "novel-pamphlet" in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What he emerged with in 1872 was at once his darkest novel until The Brothers Karamazov and his most ferociously funny. For alongside its relentlessly escalating plot of conspiracy and assassination, "Demons" (which earlier translators inaccurately titled The Possessed) is a blistering comedy of ideas run amok. And, like all of Dostoevsky's novels, it is also a riot of literary voices, whose profusion, energy, and variety are rendered wonderfully in this English version by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

About the Translators

   Richard Pevear has published translations of Alain, Yves Bonnefoy, Albert Savinio, and Pavel Florensky, as well as two books of poetry.  He has received fellowships for translation from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in support of the translation of The Brothers Karamazov. Larissa Volokhonsky was born in Leningrad.  She has translated the work of the prominent Orthodox theologians Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff.

   Pevear and Volokhonsky were awarded the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for their version of The Brothers Karamazov. They are married and live in France

From the Trade Paperback edition.