The perverted ideal in Dostoevsky's "The Devils"
By: Nancy K. Anderson.
Series: Middlebury studies in Russian language and literature,; v. 8
Publisher: Peter Lang; Lang AG International Academic Publishers, Peter
Published: 1997
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 173
Subjects: Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821-1881.
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [167]-170) and index.