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 Camus’s own moral conviction. Drawing on hundreds of pages from Dostoevsky’s notebooks, he sought to preserve the “thread of suffering and affection that makes Dostoevsky’s universe so close to each of us.”
