The Perverted Ideal in Dostoevsky's «The Devils»

By Nancy K. Anderson

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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0820433187
• ISBN13: 9780820433189
• Release Date: November 1997
• Publisher: Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publi
• Length: 173 Pages