The Possessed. A Novel in Three Parts.

New York: The Macmillan Company, [no date] c.1916. Hardcover, gray cloth boards. Good/No Jacket. Scarce early American edition. 637 pages, from the Russian by Constance Garnett. Title page is undated, but this is from the uniform edition (7.5"" tall) of The Novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky (Volume III) published in the 1910s, states that 'other volumes [are] in preparation,' and includes a folded Macmillan advertisement of their 'New 1916 Novels.' Small Brentano's sticker on rep. Wear to covers, especially darkened spine, endpapers spotted, front hinge cracking. Also known as The Devils or The Demons, and originally published in 1871-2, this is the violent and bloody tale of the sinister hero Stavrogin, a powerful example of Dostoevsky's 'great sinner who has lost his faith.' The novel follows the strange life of Nikolay Stavrogin, a brilliant and attractive but sterile & nihilistic man, with a parallel plot line tracing the revolutionary movement in Russia. Dostoevsky, 1821-1881, was one of the most influential writers in modern literature. He lived a difficult life; he suffered epileptic attacks, lost his mother when he was only 16, his father was murdered by serfs, he spent time in a labor camp as a political prisoner, and he suffered the death of his wife and brother in his 40s. All this contributed to his range of ideas, psychological perception, and philosophical profundity, which made him a supreme master of the realistic novel.