The Devils, or The Posessed, is the most controversial of Dostoyevskys masterpieces. A political drama, it has been both hailed as a grim prophesy of the Russian Revolution and denounced as the work of a reactionary renegade. The book is a penetrating commentary on men and affairs, with malicious caricatures of revolutionaries and revolutionary personalities. It is also a work of tragic intensity; Dostoyevsky, tormented by the conflict between good and evil, probed into the very recesses of the mind to discover the dark passions of men.