Russia, a number of dissident authors found a prototype for the Soviet police state in the system expounded by Shigalev at the meeting of Pyotr Verkhovensky's revolutionary society. Boris Pasternak, Igor Shafarevich, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, have called Dostoevsky's description of Shigalevism prophetic, anticipating the systematic politicide which followed the October Revolution. Pasternak often used the term "Shigalevism" (shigalevshchina) to refer to Joseph Stalin's Great Purge. According to Richard Pevear, Dostoevsky even presaged the appearance of Lenin himself with his description of the final reader at the ill-fated literary gala: "a man of about forty, bald front and back, with a grayish little beard, who...keeps raising his fist over his head and bringing it down as if crushing some adversary to dust." Dostoevsky biographer Ronald Hingley described the novel as "an awesome, prophetic warning which humanity, no less possessed of collective and individual devilry in the 1970s than in the 1870s, shows alarmingly few signs of heeding." Robert L. Belknap notes its relevance to the twentieth century in general, "when a few Stavrogins empowered thousands of Pyotr Stepanovichs to drive herds of 'capital', to use Nechayev's term, to slaughter about a hundred million people, the very number Shigalyev and Pyotr hit upon." In his book Dostoyevsky in Manhattan French philosopher André Glucksmann argued that 'nihilism', as depicted in Demons, is the underlying idea or 'characteristic form' of modern terrorism. English translations This is a list of the unabridged English translations of the novel: Constance Garnett (1914, as The Possessed) David Magarshack (1953, as The Devils) Andrew R. MacAndrew (1962, as The Possessed) Michael R. Katz (1992, as Devils) Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1994) Robert A. Maguire (2008) Roger Cockrell (2018, as Devils) Adaptations 1913, play produced by the Moscow Art Theater. 1959, French play The Possessed written by Albert Camus. 1969, BBC mini-series The Possessed adapted by Lennox Phillips starring Keith Bell; also broadcast on PBS television in 1972. 1988, French film Les Possédés adapted by Andrzej Wajda. 2009, "...the itsy bitsy spider..." adapted by Alexandre Marine for Studio Six Theatre Company. 2014, Russian mini-series by Russia-1 and post-modern film. 2021, BBC Radio 4 mini-series Devils adapted by Melissa Murray starring Joseph Arkley, Jonathan Forbes, Georgia Henshaw and Jane Whittenshaw. References External links Virginia Woolf's translation of Stavrogin's Confession Joyce Carol Oates: Tragic Rites In Dostoevsky's The Possessed Online Russian text of Demons 1872 Russian novels Novels about totalitarianism Novels