Demons

Select Bibliography

Edward Wasiolek, The Notebooks for ''The Possessed', tr. Victor Terras, University of Chicago Press, 1968. Not easy reading, but an indispensable document, not only for Demons but for Dostoevsky as a whole. In developing Stavrogin, he raises fundamental issues about all his work.

W. J. Leatherbarrow, ed., Dostoevsky's The Devils, A Critical Companion, Northwestern University Press, 1999. Four English Slavists (the editor, D. C. Offord, M. V.Jones, R. M. Davison) have collaborated on this recent and excellent group of studies devoted to the novel. They treat in turn of the book's relation to Dostoevsky's biography, the context of contemporary ideas, the problem of narration and narrative technique, and the role of Stepan Trofimovich. The volume also contains selections from the relevant correspondence, and a valuable annotated bibliography.

Nancy A. Anderson, The Perverted Ideal in Dostoevsky's The Devils, Peter Lang, N.Y., 1997. The only book in English devoted to Demons, a well-balanced and well-informed study.

Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky, His Life and Work, tr. Michael A. Minihan, Princeton University Press, 1967. Originally published by an émigré scholar in 1947, who was strongly influenced by the religious aspects of Russian Symbolism, the book still retains its value. The chapters on Demons (17 and 18) are a very good synthesis.

Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871, Princeton University Press, 1995. The volume of my own five-volume study of Dostoevsky that deals with Demons. Chapters 21, 23-25 develop the ideas in my introduction.

Irving Howe, 'Dostoevsky: The Politics of Salvation', in Politics and the Novel, Horizon Press, 1957, 51-75. A perceptive study, one of the best brief treatments.

Jacques Catteau, 'Le Christ dans le miroir des grotesques (Les Demons)', in Dostoevsky Studies 4 (1983), 29-36. A suggestive analysis of characters in the novel as distorted Christ-images.

Philip rahv, 'Dostoevski in the The Possessed', in Essays in Literature and Politics, 1932-1972, Houghton Mifflin, 1978, 107-28. An early political reading, which had a great deal of influence.

Philip Pomper, Sergei Nechaev, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, N.J., 1979. A sober study of the flamboyant revolutionary so important for Demons.

By the same author, The Russian Revolutionary Intelligentsia, Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1993. A good, brief introduction to the ideological world within which Dostoevsky wrote.