The third of Fedor Dostoevsky's five major novels, The Devils, also erroneously titled The Possessed, is a powerful political tract inspired by an assassination in 1869 and written in 1872. His central obsession was God, whom his characters constantly search for through pain, evil and humiliations. In addition, it is a profound study of atheism depicting the disarray that followed the appearance of a modish band of radicals in a small provincial town. .
The Devils is a story of revolution and religion. It is commentary on both socialism and the infant Russian Nihilist movement. Dostoevsky is largely attacking Russian socialism's tendency toward atheism and its attempt to replace Christianity with a cult of the masses. In some way he saw the direction Russia was heading before it knew it was heading that way, predicting some of the events and policies of Communist Russia. In the early 20th century Russia before the Revolution of 1917, there were many prophecies such as these concerning the coming of atheism to Russia. Now already several generations of Russian people have been raised on historical unconsciousness and atheistic prejudices as in The Devils.
The possessed seem to have sprung from the "plague- of which Raskolnikov, a confessed but not truly repented murder, dreams at the very conclusion of Crime and Punishment when he is imprisoned in Siberia. In a delirium he dreams that the world is condemned to a new plague from Asia, and that everyone is to be destroyed except a very few. The disease attacks men by way of their sanity; though mad, each believes that he alone has the truth and is estranged from his fellows. They cannot decide what is "evil,"" they do not know whom to blame, and they kill one another out of senseless spite as the infection spreads. Society approaches a crisis: the classes freely intermingle in the Governor's mansion; the fires burn; ludicrous "revolutionary- theorizing gives way to action; the fairy-tale prince, Stavrogin, commits suicide; his spiritual father, his former tutor Stephan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, strikes out upon the road in a futile, desperate pilgrimage to "find Russia-, and also dies.