Carmen Siu

Diabolic Dialogics: Les Possédés, from Dostoevsky to Wajda

The impact of theorist Mikhail Bakhtin on literary studies is staggering. As a response to the Russian formalists, Bakhtin’s theories – most notably, that of dialogism – “[promote] the subversive use of language by those who otherwise lack social power in ways that extend well beyond the sterile neutrality of structuralism” (Stam, Subversive 18). Also, works such as Epic and Novel and The Dialogic Imagination resonate strongly with other influential figures in literary studies, including Walter Benjamin, Julia Kristeva, and the French post-structuralists Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Lacan.

The question of whether or not Bakhtin’s theories should be applied to film studies is sometimes met with a disapproval that negates Bakhtin’s own desire for a democratic, open method to theory and criticism. Alternately, supporters of such an approach contend that film studies are inherently interdisciplinary and receptive to alternate modes of inquiry, making the intersection of film and Bakhtin “virtually inevitable” (Stam, Subversive 17). To acknowledge Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony within and surrounding film texts – that is, a “plurality of equally authoritative ideological positions and an extreme heterogeneity of material…many utterly contradictory and mutually exclusive concepts, judgments and evaluations” (Bakhtin 18) – is to enrich the investigation of film as an art form as well as an academic discipline. Stam maintains that a Bakhtinian approach to film offers “[t]he possibility of ‘aberrant’ readings that go against the grain of the textual discourse” (Subversive 42). Further exploration of Bakhtin’s literary theory – more specifically, the notion of dialogism – demonstrates his looming influence on the ‘intellectual play,’ the importance of the reader, and other notions synonymous with post-structuralism and the postmodern.

For Bakhtin, a literary text is “a whole formed by the interaction of several consciousnesses, none of which entirely becomes an object for the other; this interaction provides no support for the viewer who would objectify an entire event according to some ordinary monologic category (thematically, lyrically or cognitively) – and this consequently makes the viewer also a participant” (Bakhtin 18). Stam proposes this dialogic approach to film in his essay Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation. Like the literary text, “[t]he film text…is incontrovertibly social, first as an utterance, and second as an utterance that is situated, contexted, historical” (Stam, Subversive 44). This model breaks down any temporal or spatial barriers and opens up participation with a text to any reader; the reader subsequently engages with the text in a manner conditioned by their respective historical, political, social, religious, or cultural situation and background. These different contexts will result in infinitely varied, valid readings of the text. With this in mind, a film adaptation is a case of dialogism twice over – it functions as any other film text by engaging in a dialogic relationship with its viewers, but it is also, in itself, an artifact of an interlocution with the source text. Adaptations are by their very nature “caught up in the ongoing whirl of intertextual reference and transformation, of texts generating other texts in an endless process of recycling, transformation, and transmutation” (Stam, Beyond 66).

The film adaptations of the oeuvre of Fyodor Dostoevsky become particularly interesting in light of Stam’s points. Indeed, the works of the Russian master hold a special place in Bakhtinian theory. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin writes, “[t]he exceptionally acute contradictions of early Russian capitalism and the duality of Dostoevsky as a social personality, his personal inability to take a definite ideological stand, are, if taken by themselves, something negative and historically transitory, but they proved to be the optimal conditions for creating the polyphonic novel” (35). Here, Bakhtin studies the notion of polyphony, concluding that Dostoevsky’s fascinating life and times made him “capable of representing someone else’s idea, preserving a distance, neither conforming the idea nor merging it with his own expressed ideology. The idea, in his work, becomes the subject of artistic representation, and Dostoevsky himself became a great artist of the idea” (Bakhtin 85). Dostoevsky’s polyphonic works thus contain an appeal transcending spatial and temporal boundaries; adaptations of his masterpieces by renowned figures in world cinema include Hakuchi (Akira Kurosawa, 1951), Partner (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1968), A Gentle Creature (Robert Bresson, 1969), Les Possédés (Andrzej Wajda, 1988), and Nastassja (Andrzej Wajda, 1994). Though a study of any of these films would yield telling truths about Bakhtin and Dostoevsky in the cinema, my focus in this particular project lies in Wajda’s Les Possédés.

Polish cinema is a relevant site for the investigation of dialogism in film, despite conflicting opinions on this kind of engagement with film texts. For example, Paul Coates offers a rather unsympathetic explanation for this phenomenon:

So seldom do the Poles actually view their own reality reflected on the screen that they begin, with aggressive desperation, to project it there for themselves. The mechanism of this counter-projection is ‘allegorical reading’, though it might perhaps be more aptly termed a deliberately partial reading, since it involves blotting out those aspects of the original that have no bearing on ‘our reality’, which is fetishized because unrepresented (142).

Coates continues, “[t]hus the Polish director acclaimed as a seer, a national spokesman, may find his very work being stretched or amputated on a procrustean allegorical bed…Allegorical reading may be a means of preserving ‘our reality’, but it is also a form of pathology” (142). This sort of comment reduces works of Polish film criticism to mere contrived speculation. On the other hand, this built-in ‘allegorical reading,’ if it is truly as pervasive as Coates claims, certainly functions as an interesting and notable characteristic of Polish spectatorship, and thus surely weighs into a film’s creative process to some extent. Furthermore, it is of note that Poland’s longstanding history of political oppression paradoxically spurred on its earlier tradition of romanticism, wherein art serves as a vehicle for expression and revolution. Soviet state control, the imposing of Socialist Realism and censorship become a challenge to this romanticism. Writer Ryszard Kapuściński explains the inevitable blurring of allegory and symbolism in Polish cinema:

In Poland every text is read as allusive, every written situation – even the most distant in time and space – is immediately, without hesitation, applied to the situation in Poland. In this way, every text is a double text, and between the printed lines we search for sympathetic messages written in invisible ink, and the hidden message we find is treated as the most valid, the only real one. The result stems not only from the difficulty of open speech, the language of truth. It is also because this country of ours has suffered every possible experience in the world, and is still exposed to dozens of different trials, so that now in the normal course of things every Pole sees in histories that are not ours, connections with his own life (qtd. in Haltof 113).

Allegorical reading is not “stretch[ing]” or “amputat[ing]” (Coates 142) the works of a Polish filmmaker, but a dialogic, romantic attempt by filmmaker and viewer alike to rise against the creative crippling by the state.

Literary adaptation was not a new development in Polish cinema at the time of Les Possédés in 1988. Bolesław Michałek and Frank Turaj point out the popularity of this ‘genre’ during the early 1970s. They add that, in general, the filmmakers of this time did not produce strict, literal adaptations of texts; rather, “[m]ature literature offered them a dynamic impulse, an esthetic genesis. They were launched on a search for new visual language and rhythm, for elaborate compositions and structures capable of expressing ambiguous and rich themes cinematically” (54). These films also inherited “dignity and a range of topics and thereby a range of human experience not common in movies …The literary influence resulted in a dignified and intelligent cinema, charming and/or reflective, and not simply imitative” (54). Similarly, the process of film adaptation was not new to Les Possédés director Andrzej Wajda. His filmography includes the Anton Chekov adaptation The Wicked Boy (1950), the Stefan Żeromsky adaptation Ashes (1965), the Stanislaw Wyspiański adaptation The Wedding (1972), the Joseph Conrad adaptation The Shadow Line (1976), the Stanisława Przybyszewska adaptation Danton (1982), in addition to numerous Dostoevsky theatre and television adaptations for Another Man’s Wife and a Husband Under the Bed in 1962, The Devils in 1971, Nastasja Filipowna in 1977, and Crime and Punishment in 1984 (Falkowska 35-46, 27).

Concerning Crime and Punishment, Wajda reflects, “[i]t was a crime that Dostoevsky knew presaged other crimes to come and through those long exchanges he was telling us that we must look closely and learn about sin, guilt and redemption and religious ideas” (qtd. in Kaufman 689-90). This same observation applies to Les Possédés. Both Wajda’s statement, and the decisions he made in adapting the story, emphasize the dialogic resonance he found between The Devils and his contemporary condition. The alterations that Wajda makes to Dostoevsky’s text – especially concerning Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony – are crucial in the understanding of Les Possédés as an utterance. To discuss these decisions, Wajda’s omissions from the source will first be outlined. However, to call them ‘omissions’ is dubious – it is not intended to suggest that Wajda’s version is ‘missing’ anything or falls short of Dostoevsky’s own. Rather, these are conscious decisions, and the ideological implications of Wajda’s modifications will be discussed after what is ‘missing,’ ‘added,’ or ‘left remaining’ are examined.

At the level of the most obvious modifications, Wajda condenses Dostoevsky’s dramatis personae significantly. Gone are the following major characters: Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina (the wealthy, widowed landowner), the priest Tikhon, Andrei Antonovich von Lembke (governor of the province), Yulia Mikhailovna von Lembke (his wife), Semyon Yegorovich Karmazinov (writer and distant relative of Yulia Mikhailovna von Lembke, and caricature of writer Ivan Turgenev), and Sofya Matveevna Ulitina (a widow who sells bibles; she reads an excerpt from Revelation to Stepan Trofimovich and he dies at her side). The characters that Wajda omits are predominantly those considered Westernizers. In contrast to both the secret society of nihilists and the Slavophiles, the Westernizers looked for the future of Russia in the philosophies of Western Europe. They were caricatured by Dostoevsky as a self-fancied intellectual elite; his narrator devotes the majority of Part One to Stepan Trofimovich, whom he presents as the key figure of these ideas: “Only a few days ago I learned to my great amazement…that Stepan Trofimovich had been living in our province not as an exile, as we’d been led to believe; nor had he ever been under police surveillance. Such is the power of imagination!” (4). In these and other such passages, Stepan Trofimovich is, according to Bakhtin, “an epigone of the loftier lines of aphoristic thinking – of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. He spouts his ‘verities’ precisely because he has no truth of his own, but only those separate impersonal verities which for that reason cease to be ultimately true” (96). Wajda’s depiction of Stepan Trofimovich is not quite as comical as the original, but his dialogue is similarly peppered with Shakespeare citations. Wajda concentrates Dostoevsky’s entire entourage of Westernizers solely into his character (Omar Sharif), coding his ideology as unpopular and out of date. While Wajda’s film initially presents Stepan Trofimovich as a neglected and minor figure, a later analysis of his death scene shows that he is not irrelevant, nor is he a mere comic relief to the secret society.

Apart from the omissions to the cast of characters, further considerations need be made. Firstly, while the initial attention of Dostoevsky’s text is devoted to Stepan Trofimovich, this is not the case of Wajda. Rather, Wajda interestingly subdues the role of Stepan Trofimovich in favour of following the character Shatov (Jerzy Radziwiłłowicz) for the beginning sequences – indeed, character alignment with Shatov is far stronger in Les Possédés than in the source text. This character alignment is made stronger through the second point of consideration – that is, Wajda’s elimination of Dostoevsky’s narrator. Instead, the filmmaker opts for a series of intertitles at the beginning of the film:

Vers 1870, un groupe des jeunes activistes tous organisés de la ville, sont rentrés en Russie après un sejour en Suisse. Ils parlent de renverser l’ordre ancien.

On attend encore le retour de l’organisateur, qui s’appelle Pierre. Il doit ramener avec lui Nicolas Stavroguine qui passe pour l’inspirateur du groupe, un nouveau Messie.

En Russie, les esprits sont inquiets. Chacun croit voir s’approcher une révolution brutale. Les liberaux sont suite qui-vive. Mais personne ne connaît exactement l’importance du groupe, ni ses intentions véritables.

Chatov, ouvrier-imprimeur, un des activistes, a décidé de quitter le groupe. Il attend, non sans crainte, les réactions de Pierre et de Stavroguine, à leur retour.(1)

A fear of the “true intentions” of Peter (Jean-Philippe Écoffey) and Stavrogin (Lambert Wilson) on the part of Shatov, as well as the viewers, is thus established at the beginning of Wajda’s film. The camera follows Shatov for several sequences: from the initial scene in the forest, to a meeting with Peter Stepanovich Verkhovensky at Stepan Trofimovich’s, to Kirillov’s (Laurent Malet) apartment, to the train station where he awaits Nikolai Stavrogin only to slap him, and finally to the local church. This technique not only aligns the viewer with Shatov, but also prefigures him as the protagonist of Les Possédés and reveals the evil of those ‘possessed’ by Stavrogin – Shatov leaves each of these scenes en route to his next destination, while the camera and viewer linger with the characters in the secret circle. The events occurring after Shatov’s departures include a debate between the Verkhovenskys, Kirillov’s association with the drunk Lebyadkin (Wladimir Yordanoff), and Peter Stepanovich and Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina’s (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu) dangerous infatuation with Stavrogin. This technique – as well as the harsh, ominous musical leitmotif running throughout the film – begins to reveal the diabolical nature of the antagonists in Dostoevsky’s novel.

After the initial Shatov-sequences, Les Possédés begins to focus on Nikolai Stavrogin, who confers with Kirillov, Ledyadkin and Marya Timofeevna Lebyadkina (Jutta Lampe), the group of nihilists, and Peter Stepanovich. Wajda keeps a considerable amount of the plotline with regard to the secret society, albeit with a somewhat altered chronology. Nevertheless, the polyphony of The Devils is not a concept lost on Wajda. Through the constant bustling from place to place – what Bakhtin calls “the catastrophic swiftness of action” (29) – and incessant dialogue between the characters, the filmmaker demonstrates his thorough understanding of Dostoevsky’s text:

Dostojevsky's prose is theatrical, as his characters speak incessantly, driven by a desire to arrange their relationships with others and with the world by means of thoughts expressed in words…Anybody who allows the characters of Dostojevsky to speak, even if he makes no attempt to stage the ideas of the dialogue, stands a fair chance to come near the essence of the issues presented in the novels of this cruelly talented writer (Andrzej Wajda).

Wajda captures this theatricality through his emphasis on the tensions in verbal confrontation; shot-reverse-shots are edited in syncopation with the dialogue, and close-ups pay particular attention to the expressive facial features of each character (Falkowska 157). A particularly revealing sequence in this respect is that of Stavrogin visiting Shatov on the premise of warning the latter of the group’s plan to murder him. This confrontation is especially interesting in both Dostoevsky’s and Wajda’s texts, as it reinforces the radically different attitudes of the two respective characters – one as the cold inspiration of the group, and the other fused with a passionate desire to escape it. In the chapter ‘Night’, Shatov’s temperament is revealed amidst the expounding of his affection for Marya Timofeevna, Russia, and God:

“I beg you to respect me, I demand it!” Shatov cried. “…Drop that tone of yours and speak to me like a human being. At least once in your life use a human tone of voice. And not for your sake, for mine…Do away with the young gentleman in you! Understand, I demand it, demand it, otherwise I don’t want to talk to you. I won’t stand for it!”

His frenzy was approaching delirium; Nikolai Vsevolodovich frowned and became somewhat more cautious (Dostoevsky 260).

Indeed, Stavrogin inspires a mix of equally strong passions in each of his interlocutors. The other sequences following Stavrogin survey all the ideologies that have him at their center, while revealing his incapability of sharing any of them:

All of them think that he spoke with them as a mentor speaks with a pupil; in actual fact he had made them participants in his own inescapable internal dialogue, in which he was trying to convince himself, not them. Now Stavrogin hears from each of them his own words, but with a firm and monologized accent. He himself can now repeat these words only with an accent of mockery, not conviction. He had not succeeded in convincing himself of anything, and it is painful for him to listen to people whom he has convinced…In Kirillov’s and Verkhovensky’s speech as well Stavrogin hears his own voice, with an altered accent: in Kirillov the accent is maniacal conviction, in Peter Verkhovensky, cynical exaggeration (Bakhtin 260-1).

While the Shatov-sequences offer a glimpse of the “true intentions” of the conspirators, the sequences of Stavrogin and his interlocutors intensify their diabolic polyphony.

Wajda also conveys the diabolic, dialogic tension of The Devils through his film’s aesthetics. A former student of painting at Poland’s Academy of Fine Arts, Wajda’s use of high-contrast lighting and colour visually depicts the internal struggle in the minds of his characters. Locations concerning the ‘established order’ (such as Stepan Trofimovich’s house, and the police station) are predominantly shaded in blue, whereas the realm of the secret society (their homes and meeting places, usually illuminated by fire as the characters tend to meet at night) is frequently presented in bright oranges and reds. In the same way that Dostoevsky allows dialogue to permeate “into every word of the novel, making it double-voiced, into every gesture, every mimic movement on to hero’s face, making it convulsive and anguished” (Bakhtin 40), so too does Wajda seize the potential of film to depict the internal strife of his characters, and even his epoch.

The hot and cold aesthetic tension is made verbally explicit in the reference to Revelation during the death of Stepan Trofimovich:

These things saith the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the beginning of the creation of God; I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot; I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee from my mouth. Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and thou knowest not that though art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked (Revelation 3:14-17).

The divide between hot and cold parallels the condition of Poland in the mid and late 1980s, in its weighing of consequences between a socialist or a capitalist society. However, as Janina Falkowska argues, Wajda is in fact a socialist who “contradicts the wrongdoings of those in power while he remains inscribed in the very same political system…The rival ideology is not necessarily different from the dominant ideology in its principles, but it stresses its idealistic components” (10, 11). Wajda’s concern is not with socialism itself, but with its distortion under Soviet Communist rule ever since 1947. This he establishes by engaging with Dostoevsky’s text.

Bakhtin argues that the polyphony of Dostoevsky’s novels - along with their “multi-leveledness and contradictoriness” – were in fact “present as an objective fact of the epoch” (27). Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics is arguably a completion of the ideas projected by Otto Kaus, who, according to Bakhtin, fails to “explore the structural peculiarities of this multi-leveled novel, a novel denied the usual monologic unity” (20). Both Kaus and Bakhtin stress the role of the historical situation in the birth of the polyphonic novel, the latter writing “[t]he most favorable soil for it was moreover precisely in Russia, where capitalism set in almost catastrophically, and where it came upon an untouched multitude of diverse worlds and social groups which had not been weakened in their individual isolation, as in the West, by the gradual encroachment of capitalism” (20). Multi-voicedness becomes a form of resistance against the looming capitalism and consequential monologism of Dostoevsky’s time:

All ideological creative acts are conceived and perceived as possible expressions of a single consciousness, a single spirit. Even when one is dealing with a collective, with a multiplicity of creative forces, unity is nevertheless illustrated through the image of a single consciousness: the spirit of a nation, the spirit of a people, the spirit of history, and so forth. Everything capable of meaning can be gathered together in one consciousness and subordinated to a unified accent; whatever does not submit to such a reduction is accidental and unessential (82).

Writing in 1929 in Leningrad before his forty years of internal exile, Bakhtin virtually foreshadows the Socialist Realism imposed on Poland. It is this totalitarian fanaticism that informs Wajda’s interlocution with the Dostoevsky novel – he presents the same hypocrisies in a Communist situation where ideals have been taken too far. In both Dostoevsky and Wajda’s works is an ironic, sidewards glance at an idea taken too its utter extreme – the former caricatures the radicalism as a foolish and dangerous trend, while the latter reflects on a world after the extremists have taken charge.

It is in this sense that Les Possédés is important. In enhancing the role of Shatov, Wajda and fellow screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière added a scene wherein Shatov is detained with a group of other activists, awaiting a whipping before Peter Stepanovich excuses him from the authorities. In considering the intention behind this episode, it is utterly crucial to understand it as a reference to Dostoevsky’s own life. Dostoevsky began his involvement with the underground revolutionary Petrashevsky Circle in spring 1846; his participation in the organization continued until his arrest on April 23, 1849. The writer was then sentenced to death but pardoned at the last minute. Following his prison sentence in Siberia, Dostoevsky adopted a reactionary, conservative stance against the ideology of the Petrashevsky group (Dostoevsky xvii). Dostoevsky and Shatov are parallels in their aims to dissociate with these underground societies.

The inclusion of this extratextual reference demonstrates an informed decision by Wajda to engage with his source text, and its author, on a dialogic level. The character Shatov can be allegorized as Poland itself, in its experimentation with a perverted socialism, as well as the suffering of its many consequences. The ending of Wajda’s film is a flurry of repercussions brought upon by the group, beginning with the fire and deaths of Lebyadkin and Marya Timofeevna. The murders are the very peak of senseless destruction by the secret society – when Wajda juxtaposes shots of the fire with religious iconography like the burning portrait of the Virgin Mary, it serves as the ‘beginning of the end’ for the anarchists. The shot of the pigs in this sequence also hearkens back to the epigraph of The Devils: “Then went the devils out of the man, and entered into the swine: and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake, and were choked” (Luke 8:32-33). Indeed, the fire sequence begins the whirlwind that includes Shatov’s murder, Kirillov’s suicide, Peter Verkhovensky’s escape, and Stavrogin’s suicide. This sense of wayward destruction echoes Poland’s long history of Communist oppression, and perhaps most notably the imposed martial law of 1981 to 1983 under General Wojciech Jaruzelski. For seventeen months, a stringent, militant approach was taken to everyday life – while prominent figures were monitored and arrested, all aspects of the political, economic, social, and cultural were scrutinized and administered to adhere to demands of the state (Falkowska 64-66). The two major events exemplify ideologies mutated so far from their roots that they reach the point of sheer madness.

Despite the dismal tone of both the fictitious fire and the martial law, the allusion to the epigraph also offers hope for both Wajda’s characters and Poland’s future. The passage continues: “Then they went out to see what was done; and came to Jesus, and found the man, out of whom the devils were departed, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind: and they were afraid” (Luke 8:34-35), and is exemplified in the death of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky. Instead of dying at the side of Sofya Matveevna Ulitina, a woman he meets on his last journey in Dostoevsky’s text, he dies beside Lizaveta Nikolaevna. This substitution is important, as it is the final stage of Liza Nikolaevna’s transition for a figure literally tempted, and probably seduced, by Nikolai Vsevolodovich, to witnessing the senseless killing of Marya Timofeevna the holy fool, to reading the passage from Revelation to Stepan Trofimovich. In keeping with Wajda’s tendency towards the Polish romantic tradition and its figure of the messiah (Falkowska 151-2), the deaths of the radicals – especially Shatov – allow for the redemption and rebirth of a new society embodied in Lizaveta Nikolaevna, and also Marya Shatova’s child. This optimistic future serves as a model to which a post-martial law Poland of the mid 1980s can aspire. Thanks to the relative liberalization of Soviet policy under Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, Wajda’s film – and its dialogic message of re-evaluating passion, intention, and ideology – anticipates the political and civic concessions, the re-legalization of Solidarity, the election victory of Madeusz Mazowiecki and the Civic Committee in 1989, and even the country’s road to democratization one year after the release of Les Possédés.

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Caryl Emerson, Ed. and Trans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Coates, Paul. The Story of the Lost Reflection: The Alienation of the Image in Western and Polish Cinema. London: Verso, 1985.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor.  The Devils.  Michael R. Katz, Trans.  New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Falkowska, Janina. The Political Films of Andrzej Wajda: Dialogism in Man of Marble, Man of Iron, and Danton. Providence: Berghahn Books, 1996.

Haltof, Marek. Polish National Cinema. New York: Berghahn Books, 2002.

Kaufman, Michael T. “Polish Director Finds Haunting Relevance in Dostoevsky.” Crime and Punishment: the Coulson Translation, Backgrounds and Sources, Essays in Criticism. George Gibian, Ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989.

Michałek, Bolesław and Turaj, Frank. The Modern Cinema of Poland. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.

Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Film Adaptations. James Naremore, Ed. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000.

Stam, Robert. Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism, and Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

Wajda, Andrzej. “Les Possédés.” Andrzej Wajda: Official Website of Polish Movie Director: Films: Les Possédés. Proszynski i S-ka SA. Mar. 21 2005.

< http://www.wajda.pl/en/filmy/film28.html>.

Around 1870, a group of young radicals – based in the same town – have returned to Russia after a trip to Switzerland.  They are discussing an overturning of the old system. 

They await the return of the ringleader, Peter.  He is bringing with him Nikolai Stavrogin, whom they consider their inspiration, their new Messiah. 

The Russian atmosphere was anxious as everyone anticipated a violent revolt.  The Liberals were the most alert in these developments, but no one knew precisely how important this society was, or their true intentions. 

Shatov (a printer), one of these activists, has decided to quit the group.  He waits, not without fearing, the reactions of Peter and Stavrogin upon their return.

 

© C. Siu

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