The award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky continue their acclaimed series of Dostoevsky translations with this novel, also known as "The Possessed. Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horrified Russians in 1869, Dostoevsky conceived of "Demons as a "novel-pamphlet" in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What emerged was a prophetic and ferociously funny masterpiece of ideology and murder in prerevolutionary Russia--a novel that is rivalled only by "The Brothers Karamazov as Dostoevsky's greatest.