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Winds of change are finally sweeping Czarist Russia , in the 1860's. Ideas good or bad , arrive too, they have been around for decades in the rest of Europe, this land is no longer isolated ... Socialism is the new fad for the intellectuals. The serfs have been freed by Alexander the Second, courts democratized, the death penalty seldom carried out, people can speak and write freely, up to a point. There is still Siberia for those who go over the line a little. And all the new railroads, will get you to it, that cold, desolate territory, very quickly. In a provincial town where nothing ever happens, a new Governor has been appointed. Andrei Antonovich von Lembke, yes there are a lot of intelligent Germans in the country, to modernize Imperial Russia. Lembke is a good man and wants to help the Russians in his province. But a weak person and his wife, Yulia, is the power behind the throne. She is greatly influenced by Pyotr Verkhovensky , ( some say controlled by him), the secret leader of a group of Nihilists, they believe the bizarre notion, you have to destroy everything, before you can rebuild the nation. Pyotr is the estranged son of Stepan Verkhovensky, a lazy scholar, who sponges off the wealthy widow of a general, Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin. She's the head of the local high society, what there is here, and has a wild son, Nikolai, the main character in the book, who gets involved in deadly duels, and his best friend is Pyotr Verkhovensky, it's a small town. Nikolai has many adventures with women and violence, travels the world, Greece, Germany, France, Switzerland, Egypt and even Iceland, but can never be happy, his conscience will not permit that. Nikolai, is not comfortable joining the nihilists, and Pyotr is afraid of him. Strange events begin in this quiet town, a big rise in transgressions , and newspapers urging revolution, are being found. Fedka, an escaped convict, and former serf, goes on a crime spree, imagine murders and robberies, in this place ! The police can't capture him, why ? Crazy rumors flow , like a flooding river. Yulia, has problems with her jealous husband, not to mention , Varvara, a big rival, and her literary celebration efforts, and party , are a disaster, quite funny if you're not she or her friends. The wobbly Governor is acting weirdly, yelling at everyone , giving orders, the difficulty, nobody understands his words. Fires breaks out at a nearby town, more dead bodies discovered, suicides increase, there is something not right ....Dostoyevsky's philosophical novel ( inspired by a real political killing in 1869), about demons possessing the people of Russia, causing them to do evil deeds, in the name of revolution. Anything can be justified, as long as the results satisfy , ( The Ends Justify the Means). Sadly this concept is still widely believed, in the 21st century.