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 Camuss own moral conviction. Drawing on hundreds of pages from Dostoevskys notebooks, he sought to preserve the thread of suffering and affection that makes Dostoevskys universe so close to each of us.
The last finished work before Camuss death, The Possessed premiered in 1959with 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.
