When Albert Camus first read Dostoevsky as a twenty-year-old philosophystudent, it was, he said, a “soul-shaking experience.” The Possessed,with its disdain for nihilism, became a lifelong touchstone; “for almosttwenty years,” he writes in the foreword to this adaptation, “I havevisualized its characters on the stage.” The enigmatic Stavrogin, thegentle Shatov, and the God-haunted Kirilov are here reinvigorated byCamus’s own moral conviction. Drawing on hundreds of pages fromDostoevsky’s notebooks, he sought to preserve the “thread of sufferingand affection that makes Dostoevsky’s universe so close to each of us.”The last finished work before Camus’s death, The Possessed premiered in1959—with Camus himself directing. The play ran for four hours, withthirty-three actors and seven sets, and was an artistic and technicaltriumph. More than six decades later, its themes of political violenceand ideological extremism are no less potent. As Adam Gopnik concludesin a new introduction: “A play written as a summation of the madness ofthe middle of the twentieth century, The Possessed remains a warning tothe first quarter of our own.”
