The most openly political of Dostoevsky's four major novels, The Devils has left literary scholars intrigued with its difficult narrative structure which veers back and forth between first and third person, and fascinated by the political overtones and social commentary it includes. For these reasons, The Devils often anchors courses on Dostoevsky's works. This critical companion contains essays that shed light on both the tricky literary structure of the novel as well as its social and political components.

One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year From the author of Either/Or and The Idiot, Elif Batuman’s The Possessed presents the true but unlikely stories of lives devoted—Absurdly! Melancholically! Beautifully!—to the Russian Classics. No one who read Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. "Babel in California" told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages, Batuman managed to misplace Babel's last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babel's secret influence on the making of King Kong, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature. Batuman's subsequent pieces—for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the London Review of Books— have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation, and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy's ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin's wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence—including her own.

The Italian philosopher and author of Totalitarianism “rescues the concept of evil as an element necessary for guidance in political reflection” (Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review). As long as we care about suffering in the world, says political philosopher Simona Forti, we are compelled to inquire into the question of evil. But is the concept of evil still useful in a postmodern landscape where absolute values have been leveled and relativized by a historicist perspective? Given our current unwillingness to judge others, what signposts remain to guide our ethical behavior? Surveying the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western philosophical debates on evil, Forti concludes that it is time to leave behind what she calls “the Dostoevsky paradigm”: the dualistic vision of an omnipotent monster pitted against absolute, helpless victims. No longer capable of grasping the normalization of evil in today’s world—whose structures of power have been transformed—this paradigm has exhausted its explanatory force. In its place, Forti offers a different genealogy of the relationship between evil and power, one that finally calls into question power’s recurrent link to transgression. At the center of contemporary evil she posits the passive attitude towards rule-following, the need for normalcy, and the desire for obedience nurtured by our contemporary mass democracies. In our times, she contends, evil must be explored in tandem with our stubborn desire to stay alive at all costs as much as with our deep need for recognition: the new modern absolutes. A courageous book, The New Demons extends an original, inspiring call to ethical living in a biopolitical age.

The author of Clinical Lessons on Life and Madness: Dostoevsky’s Characters draws on Dostoevsky's universe to illuminate psychoanalytic theory and practice. Using Dostoevsky’s characters as case studies, the author discusses the various psychoanalytic concepts they embody, and shows how these insights can be applied to therapeutic understanding. By considering the people who populate Dostoevsky’s world as personifying a whole spectrum of human possibilities and modes of relation, Heitor O'Dwyer de Macedo’s discussion of the characters – including those from Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov – allows him to explore fundamental issues constitutive of clinical practice, such as trauma, fantasy, perversion and madness. Clinical Lessons on Life and Madness will provide an important resource for psychoanalysts with an interest in literature, as well as students of literature seeking a psychoanalytic interpretation.

Devils, also known in English as The Possessed and The Demons, was first published in 1871-2. The third of Dostoevsky's five major novels, it is at once a powerful political tract and a profound study of atheism, depicting the disarray which follows the appearance of a band of modish radicals in a small provincial town. Dostoevsky compares infectious radicalism to the devils that drove the Gadarene swine over the precipice in his vision of a society possessed by demonic creatures that produce devastating delusions of rationality. Dostoevsky is at his most imaginatively humorous in Devils: the novel is full of buffoonery and grotesque comedy. The plot is loosely based on the details of a notorious case of political murder, but Dostoevsky weaves suicide, rape, and a multiplicity of scandals into a compelling story of political evil. This new translation also includes the chapter `Stavrogin's Confession', which was initially considered to be too shocking to print. In this edition it appears where the author originally intended it.

As a writer and prophet Dostoevsky was no academic theologian, yet his writings are deeply theological: his life, beliefs, even his epilepsy, all had a role in generating his theology and eschatology. Dostoevsky's novels are riven with paradoxes, are deeply dialectical, and represent a criticism of religion, offered in the service of the gospel. In this task he presented a profound understanding and portrait of humanity. Dostoevsky's novels chart the movement of the human into death: either the movement through paradox and Christlikeness into Christ's cross (a soteriology often characterized by the apophatic negation and self-denial; what we may term "the Mark of Abel") leading to salvation and resurrection; or, conversely, the movement of those who refuse Christ's invitation to be redeemed, and continue to fall into a self-willed death and a self-generated hell (the Mark of "Cain"). This eschatology becomes a theological axiom which he unceasingly warned people of in his mature works. Startlingly original, stripped of all religious pretence (some prostitutes and criminals might just have a better understanding of salvation than some of the pietistic, wealthy, and cultured classes), Dostoevsky as a prophet forewarned of the politicized humanistic delusions of the twentieth century: a prophet crying out through the wilderness.

This final volume of Bollingen Series L covers the material Coleridge wrote in his notebooks between January 1827 and his death in 1834. In these years, Coleridge made use of the notebooks for his most sustained and far-reaching inquiries, very little of which resulted in publication in any form during his lifetime. Twenty-eight notebooks are here published in their entirety for the first time; entries dated 1827 or later from several more notebooks also appear in this volume. Following previous practice for the edition, notes appear in a companion volume. Coleridge's intellectual interests were wide, encompassing not only literature and philosophy but the political crises of his time, scientific and medical breakthroughs, and contemporary developments in psychology, archaeology, philology, biblical criticism, and the visual arts. In these years, he met and conversed with eminent writers, scholars, scientists, churchmen, politicians, physicians, and artists. He planned a major work on Logic (still unpublished at his death), and an outline of Christian doctrine, also unfinished, though his work toward this project contributed to On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830) and the revised Aids to Reflection (1831). The reader of these notebooks has the opportunity to see what one of the most admired minds of the English-speaking world thought on several issues--such as race and empire, science and medicine, democracy (particularly in reaction to the Reform Bills introduced in 1831 and 1832), and the authority of the Bible--when he wrote without fear of public disapprobation or controversy.

By Authors Possessed examines the development of the demonic in key Russian novels from the last two centuries. Defining the demonic novel as one that takes as its theme an evil presence incarnated in the protagonists and attributed to the Judeo-Christian Devil, Adam Weiner investigates the way the content of such a book can compromise the moral integrity of its narration and its sense of authorship. Weiner contends that the theme of demonism increasingly infects the narrative point of view from Gogol's Dead Souls to Dostoevsky's The Devils and Bely's Petersburg, until Nabokov exorcised the demonic novel through his fiction and his criticism. Starting from the premise that artistic creation has always been enshrouded in a haze of moral dilemma and religious doubt, Weiner's study of the demonic novel is an attempt to illuminate the potential ethical perils and aesthetic gains of great art.