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"In the late autumn of 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky found himself entranced by the rising tide of radicalism sweeping through Russia. Growing up in a conservative family, when he left home, he joined with revolutionary youths and they soon found themselves in prison and within inches of the executioners bullets. Scared straight by the experience, after he got out, he observed with an increasingly troubled heart the feverish rhetoric of the young revolutionaries who, in their hunger for upheaval, had abandoned all semblance of reason. These radicals, intoxicated by a heady blend of nihilism and a warped idealism, preached a new world where everything that existed—the state, the church, even the fabric of morality itself—was to be razed to the ground. To Dostoevsky, their ideas were not merely dangerous but profoundly ignorant, driven by the naive belief that destruction could birth a utopia. It was this raw fury of fanaticism that he would later immortalize in *The Devils*, his searing condemnation of a society on the brink of madness. The novel reflected his growing horror at the way these young men—many barely past boyhood—embraced chaos with the conviction of zealots, wholly unaware that their dreams of annihilation would ultimately consume them.
*The Devils* (alternatively titled *The Possessed*), published in 1872, was Dostoevsky’s furious response to the moral anarchy he witnessed firsthand. The book is a dark, sprawling tale of a provincial Russian town overtaken by revolutionaries, led by the enigmatic and nihilistic Pyotr Verkhovensky. These radicals, echoing the real-life figures who had disturbed Dostoevsky, descend into an abyss of violence, murder, and betrayal, revealing their utter inability to build the very future they professed to fight for. Through the novel’s vivid and disturbing characters, Dostoevsky laid bare the folly and madness of these young idealists, their ideological purity masking a tragic ignorance of human nature itself. To Dostoevsky, they were not architects of progress, but devils sowing destruction with reckless abandon." #Dostoevsky
