The Possessed

The Nobel Prize–winning author here adapts Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece for the stage—a rousing invective against nihilism that brings together two of the great literary minds of the last two centuries

When Albert Camus first read Dostoevsky as a twenty-year-old philosophy student, it was, he said, a “soul-shaking experience.” The Possessed, with its disdain for nihilism, became a lifelong touchstone; “for almost twenty years,” he writes in the foreword to this adapta­tion, “I have visualized its characters on the stage.” The enigmatic Stavrogin, the gentle Shatov, and the God-haunted Kirilov are here reinvigorated by Camus’s own moral conviction. Drawing on hundreds of pages from Dostoevsky’s notebooks, he sought to preserve the “thread of suffering and affection that makes Dosto­evsky’s universe so close to each of us.”

The last finished work before Camus’s death, The Possessed premiered in 1959—with Camus himself directing. The play ran for four hours, with thirty-three actors and seven sets, and was an artistic and techni­cal triumph. More than six decades later, its themes of political violence and ideological extremism are no less potent. As Adam Gopnik concludes in a new introduc­tion: “A play written as a summation of the madness of the middle of the twentieth century, The Possessed remains a warning to the first quarter of our own.”