1 Other explicit genre indicators include satire, the novel, and the chronicle (khronika), the latter appearing to be used in the general sense of history or historical account, for the narrator also refers to Shakespeare’s historical plays as a “timeless chronicle” (bessmertnaia khronika). Dostoevskii, F. M., Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh(Leningrad, 1974), 10:36Google Scholar. Further references to this work are provided in the text. All translations from the Russian are my own.

2 The parade probably most closely resembles Renaissance masque, whereas when the various allegorical figures become unruly (standing on their heads and so on) the antimasque is invoked. The masque’s plot was usually mythological or allegorical. For a description, see Enid, Welsford, The Court Masque: A Study in the Relationship between Poetry and the Revels(New York, 1962), 50, 145Google Scholar.

3 Cf. the rampant speculations about Chichikov’s identity and aims in chapter 8 of Dead Souls. To a great extent, both Dead Soulsand The Possessedcan be read as historical or religious allegories in their use of the central theme of Russia’s past and future development amid the falsehood and deception of the Imposter’s world.

4 The historical allusions to “Grishka” Otrep'ev, the first of the “false Dmitris,“ and to the Time of Troubles reinforce and enrich this interpretive line. The narrator’s comment, “In troubling timesof hesitation or transition [v smutnoe vremia kolebaniia Hi perekhoda]there are always and everywhere little people who turn up” (354, emphasis added), is one of many instances in which Dostoevskii is known to have used the phrase “time of troubles” (smutnoe vremia)to refer to postreform Russia (12:309—note to p. 354). With this in mind, we may understand his having given a copy of The Possessedto Alexander III, a symbolic acknowledgment of the latter’s role as equivalent, in Dostoevskii’s estimation, to Michael Romanov’s ascension to the throne in 1613, which brought an end to a decade of famine, invasions, pretenders, and peasant revolts. Such a reading reinforces the notion of the work as a national-historical allegory.

5 One should note, in particular, Kirillov’s direct reference to the Apocalypse (188) and the apocalyptic imagery in Liza’s suggestion that “according to the calendar … the sun should have risen a full hour ago, but it looks like night outside” (398); also Petr Stepanovich’s remark after dismissing the “meaningless convention” of concerns over lost virginity, “Where are you going? ... Ah see, you've fallen” (410) and the implicit connection with the “fall” of Babylon (“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!“ Revelation 18:2). For more detailed interpretation along these lines, see Leatherbarrow, William J., “Apocalyptic Imagery in The Idiot and The Possessed,” in Dostoevsky Studies 3(1982): 43–51 Google Scholar; Geir, Kjetsaa, Dostoevsky and His New Testament(Oslo, 1984)Google Scholar. An insightful reading may also be found in Dianne Michelle Kowalski, “Projections of the Apocalypse in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Devils:A Senior Thesis” (senior thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1989).

6 I have discussed the nature of generic fields in “A Wolf in Arkadia: Generic Fields, Generic Counterstatement and the Resources of Pastoral in Fathers and Sons,“in Russian Review55, no. 3 (July 1996): 475-93.

7 Lewis, C. S., The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition(New York, 1958), 45–46 Google Scholar. Although Lewis uses symbolism and sacramentalism synonymously, for the sake of clarity I shall employ the term sacramentalismexclusively. Though Lewis’s definition makes it clear that he has more than medieval allegory in mind, it seems prudent to limit any undue associations with fin de siècle symbolism.

8 Quintillian treats allegory as extended metaphor. Institutes of Oratory, bk. 8, chap. 6, 44-58.

9 Lewis, Allegory of Love, 47-48.

10 Cf., for instance, such nineteenth-century novels as A. Mikhailov-Sheller’s Gnilye bolota(1863), I. V. Fedorov-Omulevskii’s Shag za shagom(1870), and K. M. Staniukovich’s Bez iskhoda(1873).

11 On the ménage à trois as a stable cultural symbol in nineteenth-century Russia, see Irina Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior(Stanford, 1988), 136-50.

12 The relation between satire and allegory in the work is complex and deserves an in-depth study of its own, something I have attempted in "The Chaos and Order of Genre in Dostoevskii’s The Possessed," in "The Rise of the Russian Tendentious Novel: Generic Hybridization and Literary Change" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1993). Suffice it to note here that the two appear to be inversely oriented: whereas satire generally treats many different topics from diverse standpoints, allegory brings its entire subject matter under great and overarching metaphors; whereas satire treats quite specific, topical subjects, allegory generally addresses some universal idea, very often projecting events against religious or national history; and whereas satire thrives on diversity of style and voice and subversion of authority, even its own, allegory requires discursive unity and singleness of purpose. For an exhaustive enumeration of the work’s countless satirical targets, see the commentary to the novel in Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 12.

13 For an in-depth analysis of the Stavrogin-Hal parallels, see Leer, N., “Stavrogin and Prince Hal: The Hero in Two Worlds,” Slavic and East European Journal 6, no. 2(1962): 99–116 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 The marked taciturnity of both Kirillov and Stavrogin parodies the typically imperturbable heroes of nihilist novels from the 1860s onward, though the two characters are, of course, much more than parody. Kirillov’s extreme brand of affliction might be described as a sort of nihilist aphasia or perhaps autism, denoting the loss of figurative speech and understanding. His ideas have already become reality in his mind, and his entire existence is devoted to realizing them. In this connection, one should recall that in the Underground Man’s terminology, “2x2 = 4 looks like a fop and stands with arms akimbo, barring your path and spitting” (5:119). By personifying positivistic natural laws, especially in the image of an insolent dandy who bars one’s path, Dostoevskii consolidates the inherent contradiction between universal physical laws and the apotheosized human will—a major tenet of literary nihilist doctrine (cf., Chernyshevskii’s Rakhmetov). The law’s existence may in some abstract sense curtail human freedom, but what evokes anger and rebellion on the Underground Man’s part is not the law per se but its identification with the will of the “other“: the problem is not the law’s existence but its attitude.

15 Lewis, Allegory of Love, 46.

16 This confusion is exemplified in what Isaiah Berlin once described as the deliberatemerging of life and art by Vissarion Belinskii in his critical essays, a “method virtually invented by [him]—the kind of criticism in which the line between life and art is of set purpose not too clearly drawn; in which praise and blame, love and hatred, admiration and contempt are freely expressed both for artistic forms and for the human characters drawn, both for the personal qualities of authors and for the content of their novels, and the criteria involved in such attitudes, whether consciously or implicitly, are identical with those in terms of which living human beings are in everyday life judged or described.” Berlin, , “Birth of the Russian Intelligentsia,”in Henry, Hardyand Aileen, Kelly, eds., Russian Thinkers(New York, 1978), 116 Google Scholar.

17 Luke 8:32-33.

18 Compare also his use of the phrase “that’s where our road leads” (tuda nam doroga)with his emphasis on the symbolism of the “great road” as he departs the town where he has spent the past twenty years (480-81).

19 Stavrogin’s association with the Antichrist is also portrayed via gothic imagery. For exploration of the gothic in Dostoevskii, see the insightful treatments by Robin Feuer, Miller, “Dostoevsky and the Tale of Terror,”in John, Garrard, ed., The Russian Novel from Pushkin to Pasternak(New Haven, 1983), 103–21Google Scholar; and George, Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism(New York, 1959), esp. 192–215 Google Scholar.

20 I am indebted to Daniel Collins of Ohio State University for pointing out the potential historical significance of the name Tushin.

21 Revelation 17:5, 16.

22 Viacheslav, Ivanov, “Ekskurs: Osnovnoi mif v romane ‘Besy,'”in Sobranie sochinenii(Brussels, 1987), 4:441Google Scholar.

23 Miller, “Dostoevsky and the Tale of Terror,” and Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.

24 Stephen A. Barney has suggested a useful distinction between “typological“ and “reified” allegory: “Lying under each is a sort of proto-allegory. Under typology lies a myth (a story), full of mystery and authority, laden with potential significance. Under reification lies a literary trope, often personification.” Allegories of History, Allegories of Love(Hamden, Conn., 1979), 30. The majority of “mini” allegories in The Possessedare thus typological: it is not Hope or Charity or Avarice that populate the work’s allegorical dimension but rather complex literary and historical constructs, recognizable sequences “full of mystery and authority” that are projected against and resonate within literary, religious, and political history.

25 That Mar'ia Timofeevna has this power undoubtedly relates to her status as “holy fool.” On holy foolishness in this and other works of Dostoevskii, see Harriet, Murav, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Critique(Stanford, 1992)Google Scholar; see also Liudmila, Saraskina, “Besy”: Roman-preduprezhdenie(Moscow, 1990), 138–58Google Scholar.

26 Susanne Fusso has provided a clever formulation of the novel’s many intertextual references as “another variety of possession that forms part of the work’s structure: the appropriation of pre-existing artistic texts for alien purposes.” “Maidens in Childbirth: The Sistine Madonna in Dostoevskii’s Devils,” Slavic Review54, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 261-75. I would suggest a slight reformulation: the “appropriation“ relates not only to preexisting texts but also to those generated in the course of the novel itself; moreover, all of the “alien purposes” may be seen in the context of one global aim: the use of literature to define, explain, and prescribe life.

27 Gary Saul, Morson, The Boundaries of Genre: Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer and the Traditions of Literary Utopia, University of Texas PressSlavic Series, no. 4(Austin, 1981), 110 Google Scholar. For an illuminating discussion of parody in The Possessed, see Fusso, “Maidens in Childbirth.“

28 The best evidence for such a reading of Pushkin’s work has been provided by Iurii, Lotman, Roman v stikhakh Pushkina “Evgenii Onegin“: Spetskurs, vvodnye lektsii i izuchenie teksta(Tartu, 1975)Google Scholar. Like The Possessed, Eugene Oneginpiles one literary possibility on top of another in a manner that serves both to satirize the modeling of personal behavior on literary texts and to contextualize itself qua literature, resulting in a clever didacticism.