The Possessed
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers who love Dostoevsky and wish to delve into his later novels of ideas
- History enthusiasts interested in nineteenth-century Russian society and revolutionary thought
- Literary readers willing to read long intellectual novels and enjoy characters' debates
- University students studying nihilism, religion, and political philosophy
Not a good fit for
- Readers who prefer light plots and fast-paced entertainment
- Beginners impatient with Russian names and long debates
- Readers seeking a Chinese translation (this is a public-domain English ebook)
Reading tips
- First map the main characters and their relationships, remember each one's ideological stance, then enter the plot.
- Read the long dialogues as clashes of ideas, noting arguments that strike you as you go.
- Slow down in chapters related to the murder, noting how earlier foreshadowing echoes characters' motives.
- Read alongside background material on nineteenth-century Russian history to help understand the novel's social context.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
Is this book in Chinese or English?
Can I read The Possessed without having read other Dostoevsky works?
What is The Possessed mainly about, and is it worth reading?
What should I note when reading the English ebook?
Comments
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About the author
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian novelist. Publicly available information on the details of his life in this database is limited, yet his works have had a profound influence. The collection here includes thirty-two of his works, among them Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, Notes from the House of the Dead, and The Grand Inquisitor. He often took criminal cases, moral dilemmas, and questions of faith as his subjects, probing his characters' inner divisions, guilt, and longing for redemption. His narratives are tense and dramatic, and his psychological portraiture is especially fine-grained. These works have secured him an important place in world literature and continue to exert a wide influence on later fiction and intellectual discussion.