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he had on a sudden depraved impulse violently raped her. The girl had been reduced to such a state of shock that she had sat in a catatonic trance, only able to mutter `I have killed God, and had eventually hanged herself. Stavrogin had found himself morally quite numb about the episode, but from then on had begun to act more and more strangely. For no apparent reason he had gone through a ceremony of marriage with the crippled and mentally defective Maria Lebyatkin. He had then abandoned her and travelled abroad for three years, where he had entered on an affair with Lisa Drozdov, a girl from the same town, and for a while contemplated bigamously marrying her, although he had then abruptly ended the affair (Lisa is now back home, and we have already met her as a friend of Mrs Stavrogin's). Eventually Nikolai had returned to their home town himself, where his strange behaviour now has some explanation. He has become plagued by hallucinations, often seeming to sense near him

,some evil creature, mocking and "rational", which took on a variety of personalities and characters, but which he knew was always the same creature'

and which he supposes to be the Devil. He has finally, in a desperate bid to free himself of his curse (or at least to come clean about it), had 300 copies printed of his `Confession, which he is planning to distribute through the town. But at the end of their interview, Father Tikhon merely warns Stavrogin that he will probably `feel driven to commit some new and still more heinous crime to avoid publication of the confession'. He has sensed that, like many tragic heroes wriggling on the hook in the Frustration Stage, Stavrogin may now be tempted into some new dark act, in a last effort at a cover up.

All is now set up for the concluding chapters of the novel which are as packed with incident as the earlier chapters seem uneventful. There are signs, such as a protest march of workers at the local factory, that some strange spirit of disorder is loose in the town which no one seems able to control. Everything comes to a climax at an absurd literary festival, organised by various local notables, with speeches and a ball. As this is unfolding, disorder breaks out, in a way which seems not so much planned as simply the breaking of the storm which has been brewing up throughout the preceding 500 pages of the book. The festival disintegrates into chaos. A great fire breaks out in part of the town and, in a house where the fire appears to have been started, the bodies of Maria and her brother are found. They have been murdered by Fedka the convict, in circumstances not altogether clear. What is clear, as the spirit of disorder takes charge in the town, is that Nikolai Stavrogin watches as if in a trance a horrifying sequence of events which he has no direct part in, but which in some terrible way he has inspired and made possible (as he admits about the first killings, `I didn't kill them - I was against the killing, but I knew they were going to be killed and I didn't stop the killers'). Other deaths follow in chaotic profusion. Lisa, the other girl wronged by Stavrogin but who still loves him, is almost casually murdered by an angry mob. The convict Fedka is found murdered outside the town. Old Mr Verkhovensky makes a last pitiful attempt to run away from Mrs Stavrogin's suffocating clutches and dies on the journey. The growing nightmare finds a final focus round Peter Verkhovensky's organising of the cold-blooded killing of the unhappy Shatov by a group of would-be `revolutionaries, which unleashes among those responsible a holocaust of remorse, confessions and suicide. At last Nikolai Stavrogin can take no more and hangs himself.

The overwhelming impression of The Devils - clearly intended from Dostoyevsky's opening quotation of the biblical story of the Gadarene swine - is of a whole group of people becoming possessed, for all sorts of disparate reasons, by a collective fantasy of violent `revolutionary action'. For a long time they are merely swept along in a state of vague anticipation, talking and