The Possessed. A Novel in Three Parts.
London: William Heinemann, 1913. First Edition. First edition in English, preceding the American edition by three years. First printing. 8vo (194 × 139mm), pp. [viii], 637, [1]. Original red cloth, lettered and decorated in gilt on spine, blind rosettes to front cover and publisher's device to rear cover, lower page edges untrimmed. Bright, solid, and beautiful, with only pinpoint spots of rubbing to a few extremities, near fine—rare in this condition. Two binding variants (identical sheets) with no established priority; this copy with "The Novels of Dostoevsky" to the upper spine and the imprint of Heinemann at the foot. One of the few titles spared the initial poor translations into English by Frederick Whishaw in the 1880s. Item #1360
Part of the series of Dostoevsky translations by Constance Garnett that established his reputation in the anglophone world and provoked what the ODNB called "a literary craze" in Britain. Garnett, who had studied classical languages at Newnham College, Cambridge, learned Russian almost by accident: during a difficult pregnancy in 1892, the exiled revolutionary Felix Volkhovsky, a weekend guest of her husband the editor Edward Garnett, presented her with a grammar, a dictionary, and a Russian story to fill her days. Through Volkhovsky she met other Russian political exiles, among them Sergei Stepniak, who reviewed her first translation (Goncharov's A Common Story) and urged her to publish it. Heinemann accepted it immediately and commissioned a translation of Tolstoy. From then until 1930 she was never without a Russian translation to do. In January 1894 she travelled alone to Russia for three months, carrying famine relief money and, at Stepniak's request, secret letters between the London exiles and the revolutionary organizations inside the country. She visited Tolstoy, who made a deep impression on her; at the 1907 convention of the Russian Social Democratic Party, held in England, she met Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin. Over thirty-five years she completed some seventy volumes: seventeen of Turgenev, thirteen of Chekhov's tales and two of his plays, thirteen of Dostoevsky, six of Gogol, four of Tolstoy, and six of Herzen. Her Dostoevsky translations, beginning with The Brothers Karamazov in 1912, were the most significant: within four years, admiration for Dostoevsky had reached the proportion of a cult in England, and by 1918 his influence had become, in one critic's phrase, "the predominant factor in the hectic evolution of young intellect." The Possessed appeared in 1914, the same year as Crime and Punishment, and drew characteristically divided reactions from Garnett's own circle. D.H. Lawrence, a frequent visitor to the Garnett household, wrote: "I've just read The Possessed. I find I've gone off Dostoyevsky, and could write about him in very cold blood. I didn't care for The Possessed: nobody was possessed enough really to interest me." Conrad, for his part, found Dostoevsky "too Russian for me"—though he was greatly influenced by him nonetheless. Garnett never made much money from her translations; Edward had persuaded her to accept a flat rate for the Dostoevsky volumes, and his cynicism about the reading public, in this case entirely unjustified, cost her a small fortune. She died peacefully in 1946, the day before her eighty-fourth birthday, happy that the war was over, Hitler and Mussolini were dead, and her son and grandchildren alive. Her translations remain in print. (Carolyn G. Heilbrun, The Garnett Family, 1961.)
The Possessed (also translated as Demons or Devils) was inspired by the 1869 murder of a student by the revolutionary cell of Sergei Nechaev, but Dostoevsky transformed the case into something far larger: a prophetic anatomy of political radicalism and the spiritual void that breeds it. The novel's central figure, Stavrogin, is among the most disturbing characters in all of fiction; charismatic, intellectually brilliant, and utterly empty, a man who has exhausted every sensation and belief and arrived at a nihilism so complete that it generates revolutionary fervor in everyone around him while leaving him with nothing. The radicals who orbit him (Pyotr Verkhovensky, the cynical organizer who believes in nothing but power; Kirillov, the philosopher who plans to kill himself to prove that God does not exist; Shigalyov, the theorist whose system of absolute equality concludes logically in absolute despotism) are not caricatures but ideas given flesh, and every one of their arguments has since been enacted in history. Dostoevsky wrote the novel as a satire of the Russian liberal intelligentsia, but what he produced was a prophecy of totalitarianism itself, decades before the twentieth century supplied the evidence, and the most unsettling political novel ever written.
Price: $7,500.00