A survey of seven articles since 1991 reveals a tendency to focus especially on the narrator’s role in the novel, the recurring motif of pretense in characters, and the importance of biblical allusion in Dostoevsky’s establishment of an anti-nihilist moral perspective. This is most evident when comparing and contrasting the views advanced toward the novel from various critical disciplines. Just as The Possessed has what Offord calls a “close, though complex relationship” (64) with the numerous contexts surrounding it, the critics’ own commentaries on the novel are intimately connected with a larger academic and literary community. Nevertheless, these critics can still be observed to center their writings on similar passages and concepts. In a similar fashion, the critics of The Possessed themselves-by representing a wide variety of opinions on the novel-show a certain amount of external fragmentation where their respective analyses disagree. This presence of internal fragmentation is widely discussed among Dostoevsky’s critics. Offord, professor of Russian language at the University of Bristol, one of these is “the multiplicity of perspectives” presented within the author’s pages (63). There is no doubt that it bears all the expected features of the typical Dostoevskian novel. Subsequent translations also established the titles Demons and The Devils as accepted variations on the name. One response to this rising nihilist movement came in the form of a political novel, The Possessed, written by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The late nineteenth century marked a time in which revolutionary and radical individuals were gaining attention in Eastern Europe, largely because of their open reliance on direct violence as a means for addressing perceived social inequities.
Part of a manuscript page from Dostoevsky’s novel Demons (ca.
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