The Mysterious Bookshop
Fyodor Dostoevsky - Demons (The Possessed)
The title has been translated alternately as Demons, Devils, and The Possessed over the course of its publishing history. Joyce Carol Oates recommended The Possessed, though this is the most recent translation of that novel, rendered here as Demons.
Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horried Russians in 1869, Fyodor 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 pre-revolutionary Russia.
