The Devils, or The Posessed, is the most controversial of Dostoyevsky's masterpieces. A political drama, it has been both hailed as a grim prophesy of the Russian Revolution and denounced as the work of a reactionary renegade. The book is a penetrating commentary on men and affairs, with malicious caricatures of revolutionaries and revolutionary personalities. It is also a work of tragic intensity; Dostoyevsky, tormented by the conflict between good and evil, probed into the very recesses of the mind to discover the dark passions of men.'Stavrogin's Confession', the section omitted when the novel first appeared, has been added as an appendix in this volume.~from the back cover