The Perverted Ideal in Dostoevsky's The Devils

The Devils (also translated as The Possessed) is one of the four major novels of the great nineteenth-century Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky.

This book is the first full-length English-language study of The Devils to examine the novel as a unified whole.

Its approach is based upon recognition of a central theme of Dostoevsky's thought: the human need of and search for an ideal transcending the needs and demands of one's own self.

Such an ideal may be expressed in many spheres - in religion, in the relations between human beings, and in aesthetics.

As this work demonstrates, The Devils is a powerful psychological and sociological study of what occurs when the ideal of transcendence is denied in each of these spheres and a perverted ideal - an anti-ideal - is set up in its place.