Demons (Penguin Classics)

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In the past Stavrogin had inspired Shatov with exhortations of the Russian Christ, but this marriage and other actions have provoked a complete disillusionment, which Shatov now angrily expresses. Stepan Trofimovich also has a son from a previous marriage but he has grown up elsewhere without his father's involvement. As a young man Dostoevsky himself was a member of a radical organisation (the Petrashevsky Circle), for which he was arrested and exiled to a Siberian prison camp. Dostoevsky shows where the revolutionary idealism of 19th-century Russia was heading – murderous totalitarianism.

Shatov, during a spell abroad in America, breaks with the revolutionary circle led by the wily and fanatical Pyotr Stepanovich Verhovensky, and becomes a Russian nationalist and Slavophile under the influence of Stavrogin (who simultaneously encourages another character, Kirillov, to become a nihilist).The narrator in this sense is present merely as an agent for recording the synchronisation of multiple autonomous narratives, with his own voice weaving in and out of the contrapuntal texture. Russian national-chauvinism is hardly preferable as an alternative to the revolutionary nihilism that Dostoevsky portrayed in his book.

The reading starts with the unscheduled appearance on stage of a hopelessly drunk Captain Lebyadkin, apparently for the purpose of reading some of his poetry. He is depicted as an emotionally unstable man-child who cannot discipline his own son, and whose behaviour serves to corrupt the younger generation.Though dismayed, Stepan Trofimovich accedes to her proposal, which happens to resolve a delicate financial issue for him.

The plot centres around a gang of revolutionary students, whose rejection of official Russia in favour of revolutionary ideas leads to their downfall and the corruption and degradation of the entire community in which they live. Marya's brother, the drunkard Captain Lebyadkin, comes looking for his sister and confuses Varvara Petrovna even further with semi-deranged rantings about some sort of dishonour that must remain unspoken. Shatov "rose from the dead" after hearing Stavrogin's uncompromising exhortation of Christ as the supreme ideal (an assertion made in a futile effort to convince himself: he succeeds in convincing Shatov but not himself). All the same, we must accept that this triumph will come one day, even though none of those who at present steer the world's fate have any idea about it at all. She is the daughter of Varvara Petrovna's friend Praskovya, and is another former pupil of Stepan Trofimovich.

The award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky continue their acclaimed series of Dostoevsky translations with this novel, also known as The Possessed. By this time it is known that it is Stavrogin's wife who has been murdered, and Liza is recognized as 'Stavrogin's woman'.

Pyotr Stepanovich adopts a similarly destabilizing approach toward his father, driving Stepan Trofimovich into a frenzy by relentlessly ridiculing him and further undermining his disintegrating relationship with Varvara Petrovna. One is reminded of how Lenin and Stalin, in building the totalitarian Bolshevik regime, sought to bind their comrades to them by making them complicit in the murder of millions.

BBC mini-series The Possessed adapted by Lennox Phillips starring Keith Bell; also broadcast on PBS television in 1972. After a mock-execution his sentence was commuted to hard labour in Siberia where he developed epilepsy. Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky is the son of Stepan Trofimovich and the principal driving force of the mayhem that ultimately engulfs the town.