A Serial Novel, 1871 to 1872
The novel was serialized in The Russian Messenger from 1871 to 1872. According to Joseph Frank's biography, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky returned to Petersburg on July 8, 1871, with the trial in the Nechayev case under way and the first two parts of Demons already published, and the serial ended only in 1872. The book edition came out in 1873 and was financed by the couple themselves, Dostoevsky and his wife, Anna Grigoryevna:
Anna and Dostoevsky published Demons at their own expense in 1873, in a print run of 3,500 copies, with a profit of 4,000 rubles on the first edition.
The Nechayev Case
The starting point is a real event. On November 21, 1869, the student Ivan Ivanov was murdered in Moscow by a secret revolutionary group led by Sergei Nechayev, and only on December 29 did the press link Nechayev's name to the crime. Dostoevsky set aside the project The Life of a Great Sinner to write, first as an anti-nihilist pamphlet, the novel that would become this one. What the novel does with the case, however, is not reportage, and Frank marks the limit:
Of course your novel is not limited to the real, somewhat insignificant dimensions of the Nechayev case.
The Title and the Epigraphs
The Russian title is Бесы, "demons" (our translation). The early English versions, like the French Les Possédés, gave the standard title The Possessed; more recent translations made from the Russian often use Demons.
The book opens with two epigraphs: lines by Pushkin about travelers lost in a storm, who see a procession pass and ask whether it is the burial of a goblin or the wedding of a witch, and the passage from Luke 8:32-36, in which the demons come out of a man and enter a herd of swine, which rushes into the lake and drowns. The chronicler tells that Sofya Matveyevna, the seller of Gospels, at once found in Luke the passage that he placed at the opening of his chronicle (Part Three, Chapter VII). In a letter to Maikov, written a day after sending off the first chapters, Dostoevsky gives the same image as the theme of the book:
The demons have come out of the Russian man and entered a herd of swine, that is, into the Nechayevs and Serno-Solovyevichs et al. These have drowned or will drown, and the cured man, from whom the demons have already come out, sits at the feet of Jesus.
The Chapter the Magazine Rejected
Dostoevsky wanted the chapter "With Tikhon," Stavrogin's confession, placed right after Chapter VIII of Part Two. Katkov, editor of The Russian Messenger, rejected it as too realistic. The author tried milder versions and finally decided to keep the substance, and the text only came to light in 1922, found among his papers. That is why editions usually include it as an appendix, at the end of the book.