erchant, is the incarnation of undisciplined passion,
who ends by killing the thing he loves, Nastasia, also a creature of
unbridled impulses,--because he feels that he can never really and
fully possess her. The catastrophe, the description of the night after
Rogozhin has killed Nastasia, is like nothing else in literature;
lifelike in detail and immense, in the way in which it makes you
listen at the keyhole of the soul, immense with the immensity of a
great revelation. The minor characters in the book are also all of
them remarkable; one of them, the General's wife, Madame Epanchin, has
an indescribable and playful charm.

_The Idiot_ was followed by _The Possessed_, or _Devils_, printed in
1871-72, called thus after the Devils in the Gospel of St. Luke, that
left the possessed man and went into the swine; the Devils in the book
are the hangers-on of Nihilism between 1862 and 1869. The book
anticipated the future, and in it Dostoyevsky created characters who
were identically the same, and committed identically the same crimes,
as men who actually lived many years later in 1871, and later still.
The whole book turns on the exploitation by an unscrupulous,
ingenious, and iron-willed knave of the various weaknesses of a crowd
of idealist dupes and disciples. One of them is a decadent, one of
them is one of those idealists "whom any strong idea strikes all of a
sudden and annihilates his will, sometimes for ever"; one of them is a
maniac whose single idea is the production of the Superman which he
thinks will come, when it will be immaterial to a man whether he lives
or dies, and when he will be prepared to kill himself not out of fear
but in order to kill fear. That man will be God. Not the God-man, but
the Man-God. The plan of the unscrupulous leader, Peter Verkhovensky,
who was founded on Nechaev, a Nihilist of real life, is to create
disorder, and amid the disorder to seize the authority; he imagines a
central committee of which he pretends to be the representative,
organizes a small local committee, and persuades his dupes that a
network of similar small committees exist all over Russia; his aim
being to create them gradually, by persuading people in every plot of
fresh ground that they exist everywhere else.

Thus the idea of the book was to show that the strength of Nihilism
lay, not in high dogmas and theories held by a large and
well-organized society, but in the strength of the will of one or two
men reacting