Dostoevsky had a message. He wanted to show that Russia was being destroyed by its radicals. In 1872 he penned a novel called "The Possessed" showing a village's intellectuals as flawed and spiritual failures. But he inadvertently created a very compelling novel.

As Tom Wolfe once observed, Dostoevsky couldn't make his ideas dominate his characters. He'd been intent on fictionalizing the real-life murder of a revolutionary by other members of their group. Into this story he folded Nikolai Stavrogin, a character enduring a tragically failed romance that Dostoevsky originally meant for another novel. Like most of his novels, there's a large and complex set of characters highlighting different aspects of his story. A century later Joyce Carol Oates would say the resulting novel was one of Dostoevsky's most confused - and one of his most violent.