![]() Dostoevsky’s biographer Joseph Frank has suggested that the second epigraph, in particular, is one of the keys to the novel. The second is from the biblical story of the Gadarene swine, in which Jesus exorcises some demons from an afflicted man, driving them into some pigs, which promptly stampede into a lake and drown. The first, from Pushkin’s poem of the same name, evokes the folkloric idea of demons as nasty tricksters. Dostoevsky’s nihilists are not demons themselves they have demons.Įxplaining his and Volokhonsky’s preferred translation, Pevear argues that the title needs to be understood in light of the novel’s two epigraphs. ![]() Yet the title refers not to those who are possessed, but to the possessors. Dostoevsky’s characters are possessed by the modern ideas – the materialism, the liberalism, the Western ‘nihilism’ – that he believed were corrupting Russian society. The different versions reflect the difficulty of capturing the precise implications of the Russian title. ![]() ![]() ![]() The title of Dostoevsky’s satire of Russia’s nineteenth century radicals, Bésy (1872), has been variously rendered in English as The Possessed, The Devils and, in the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, Demons. ![]()
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