Every once in a while I get the itch to actually read something long-winded and complicated and with more characters than you can comfortably keep track of. Then my first choice are the Russians. When I got the urge this October (or was it September?), I chose F. M. Dostoyevsky‘s The Possessed.[I read it in the incredible translation (German) by Swetlana Geier.]

Plot:
A small town in Russia at the end of the 19th century: Stepan Verkhovensky is an ageing intellectual who lives quite comfortably off the Widow Stavrogina. When both their sons come to visit, they mix up the local scene: Nikolai Stavrogin is very charismatic, but an utter nihilist. Piotr Verkhovensky tries to be a revolutionary, but wants to recruit Stavrogin’s charisma to help him fulfill his plan.
[It is incredibly hard to sum up this plot. On the one hand, nothing much happens, on the other hand, there are a million little things that add up to a plot. If you want to know more, I can only recommend reading the wikipedia page I linked to above.]

The Possessed is all I said before: long-winded, complicated, full of characters. And it is incredibly good. It is fascinating, has about as many layers as an onion wrapped in another onion and the characters just leap off the page.

It took me quite a while to read this book – and it’s a hard book to take your time with since it really makes it hard to keep the characters straight if you put it away for 2 or 3 days at a time. It’s also quite the opposite of an easy book, so sometimes it was a bit of a struggle to stay focussed. But it is so very worth the struggle.

The further I got into the story, the more Nikolai’s charisma extended to me, the more respect, even if grudgingly, I had to give Piotr and the more I was intrigued by the various political directions Dostoyevsky sketches in the novel (basically every character gets their own part of the political spectrum).

I have to admit that it was especially Nikolai who kept me fascinated… It’s like nobody writes characters like him anymore [interestingly enough, the person I can think of that resembles him the most is probably the Doctor]: He’s cold, he’s a coward, he’s extremely intelligent and sometimes he even does the right thing. He just doesn’t have a conscience, at least most of the time. He’s an asshole and still you want him so much not to be that you can forgive him almost anything.

Well. If you want to acquaint yourself with Dostoyevsky, I wouldn’t start with The Possessed (rather the classic Crime and Punishment*). But if you want to read a brainy, political and really interesting book and you happen to have read some classic Russian literature already, I can only recommend it.

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*If that sounds like I’m the huge Dostoyevsky specialist, trust me, I’m not. So far, I’ve read Crime and Punishment and The Possessed. Just saying that of those two, Crime and Punishment probably eases you better into the whole thing. :)