Tag Archives: Demons

Chapter 8 Despair is the Sickness unto death I first read Dostoevsky’s ‘Demons’ (AKA ‘The Possessed’) in English and didn’t much like it. If I had not later learned Russian, I probably would never have read it again. It would have remained one of those books I vaguely remembered as …

Introduction I first read Dostoevsky when I was at Cambridge doing my Ph.D.  I can’t remember why I decided to begin the Brothers Karamazov. I must have first heard of Dostoevsky when I was about eighteen. I think I saw someone reading Crime and Punishment and asked about it. I came …