Indeed, just a year after Demons had been completed, he admitted in an article that he himself might have become 'a Nechaevist .. in the days of my youth'.

What he had tried to show in Demons, he explained, was that 'even the purest of hearts and the most innocent of people can be drawn into committing such a monstrous offence'. The group around Nechaev, as he depicts them, are hardly 'the purest and the most innocent', but neither are they vile or fundamentally corrupt. They by no means approve of Pyotr's desire to spread disruption and chaos, nor of his instigation of Shatov's murder; but Dostoevsky understood how mass psychology, as well as fear, could overcome the most recalcitrant. He himself had once called Nikolai Speshnev, the leader of his underground group (very probably a biographical prototype for Stavrogin), his 'Mephistopheles', which meant that he knew how it felt to be persuaded to act against one's will in the name of a sacred cause. The scene in which Pyotr brings his rebellious pack to heel is a masterful lesson in the psycho-dynamics of group persuasion.

One could go on indefinitely exploring all the riches of Demons on various levels, and its relation both to its author and the period with which it deals. So far as the latter is concerned, it is practically an encyclopedia of the Russian culture of its time, filtered through a witheringly derisive and often grotesquely funny perspective. Nothing in the European novel compares with it, except perhaps Balzac's Les Illusions perdues or Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale - the latter most of all because of its equally disillusioned view of Socialism, more disillusioned, in fact, than Dostoevsky's. For Pyotr Verkhovensky, who is nothing if not self-conscious, declares to Stavrogin, in the scene where he explains his plan to make him Ivan the Tsarevich: 'I'm a crook, not a Socialist, ha ha!'

Dostoevsky has hardly been given enough credit for this disclaimer, which allowed Russian critics in the late Stalinist period to argue that he was not in fact attacking Russian radicalism as a whole but only its anarchist wing.

Once, when evoking his past, Dostoevsky recalled how, even before he had learned to read, 'I used to spend the long winter evenings before going to bed listening . . agape with ecstasy and terror as my parents read aloud from the novels of Ann Radcliffe.' This queen of Gothic mystery thrillers was Dostoevsky's memorable initiatrix to literature, and he never forgot the lessons he absorbed from her during those long winter evenings. His own novelistic technique, as Leonid Grossman pointed out long ago in a classic study, was modelled both on Ann Radcliffe and her successors, especially French ones, who catered to the popular taste for suspense, mystery and narrative surprise. Dostoevsky was the only Russian writer of his stature to employ these Gothic devices, and he was severely rapped over the knuckles for the 'vulgarity' of doing so (a sniffish and snobbish critical tradition that has been regrettably carried into our own day by Vladimir Nabokov). But Dostoevsky, who unlike his rivals wrote for a living, paid no attention to his detractors, and we should be grateful that he shrugged them off. For Demons is not only a novel that deals with some

of the profoundest issues of the modern world, and indeed of human life - it is also a riveting pageturner, a great read, a thriller par excellence that is impossible to put down. Joseph Frank

Joseph Frank is Professor Emeritus in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and Professor Emeritus in Slavic and Comparative Literature from Stanford University. He has just completed a highly acclaimed fivevolume study of Dostoevsky's life and work. The second volume, Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography in 1985.

Select Bibliography

Edward Wasiolek, The Notebooks for ''The Possessed', tr. Victor Terras, University of Chicago Press, 1968. Not easy reading, but an indispensable document, not only for Demons but for Dostoevsky as a whole. In developing Stavrogin, he raises fundamental issues about all his work. W. J. Leatherbarrow, ed., Dostoevsky's The Devils, A Critical Companion, Northwestern University Press, 1999. Four English Slavists (the editor, D. C.