A provincial Russian town, dull enough that the arrival of anyone at all is an event. Into it come two sons. One is Nikolay Stavrogin, beautiful, rich, perfectly composed, back from years abroad that nobody can get an account of. The other is Pyotr Verhovensky, who talks constantly, laughs at everything, carries lists in his pocket, and within weeks has half the town believing he represents a vast organisation somewhere above him.
There is no organisation. There are five men in a room who have agreed to call themselves a cell, and Pyotr's real talent is for finding what each of them is ashamed of. One wants to leave. So Pyotr explains to the other four that the surest way to bind men together for ever is to have them kill someone as a group, and he has already chosen who.
Around that arrangement Dostoevsky builds the loudest novel he ever wrote. A governor's wife stages a charity fete for the benefit of governesses and it collapses into heckling, a recitation nobody can stop, and a fire across the river. An old liberal who has spent twenty years being charming discovers his son has no use for him. A woman with a crippled leg tells a drawing room she is married to Stavrogin. An engineer works out that the only free act available to a man is to shoot himself, and then keeps the appointment.
Dostoevsky took the frame from the newspapers. In 1869 a student named Ivanov was murdered by four members of his own revolutionary circle on the instruction of its organiser, Sergey Nechaev, for wanting out. The trial ran while Dostoevsky was writing, and he used it, and then went past it into the thing he actually wanted to say: that an idea held without any love in it will start asking for bodies, and will get them.
The novel is published in modern translations as Demons and as The Devils. This edition sets Constance Garnett's translation, the one that gave the book to English readers, under the title she gave it.
All three parts entire, complete and unabridged. It follows the first editions and, like nearly all of them, does not include the chapter At Tikhon's, which the censor struck before publication and which carries Stavrogin's confession.
This is the Civil Savage Society edition, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 696 pages, set in EB Garamond and printed on 60# cream stock.
Hardcover: casewrap edition, built for the shelf and the long haul.
Paperback: perfect bound, the same interior, meant to be carried and read to pieces.
Print editions are produced on demand. Nothing warehoused, never out of print.
