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    The Possessed

    A Play in Three Parts

    Author Albert Camus
    Introduction by Adam Gopnik
    Translated by Justin O'Brien
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    Paperback
    $17.00 US
    Knopf | Vintage
    On sale Apr 21, 2026 | 240 Pages | 9798217008193
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    The Nobel Prize–winning author here adapts Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece for the stage—a rousing invective against nihilism that brings together two of the great literary minds of the last two centuries

    When Albert Camus first read Dostoevsky as a twenty-year-old philosophy student, it was, he said, a “soul-shaking experience.” The Possessed, with its disdain for nihilism, became a lifelong touchstone; “for almost twenty years,” he writes in the foreword to this adapta­tion, “I have visualized its characters on the stage.” The enigmatic Stavrogin, the gentle Shatov, and the God-haunted Kirilov are here reinvigorated by Camus’s own moral conviction. Drawing on hundreds of pages from Dostoevsky’s notebooks, he sought to preserve the “thread of suffering and affection that makes Dosto­evsky’s universe so close to each of us.”

    The last finished work before Camus’s death, The Possessed premiered in 1959—with Camus himself directing. The play ran for four hours, with thirty-three actors and seven sets, and was an artistic and techni­cal triumph. More than six decades later, its themes of political violence and ideological extremism are no less potent. As Adam Gopnik concludes in a new introduc­tion: “A play written as a summation of the madness of the middle of the twentieth century, The Possessed remains a warning to the first quarter of our own.”
    ALBERT CAMUS was born in Algeria in 1913. He spent the early years of his life in North Africa, where he became a journalist. During World War II, he was one of the leading writers of the French Resistance and an editor of Combat, an underground newspaper he helped found. His fiction, including The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall, and Exile and the Kingdom; his philosophical essays The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel and his plays The Just Assassins, The Misunderstanding, and Caligula have assured his preeminent position in modern literature and philosophy. In 1957, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car accident. View titles by Albert Camus

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    The Nobel Prize–winning author here adapts Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece for the stage—a rousing invective against nihilism that brings together two of the great literary minds of the last two centuries

    When Albert Camus first read Dostoevsky as a twenty-year-old philosophy student, it was, he said, a “soul-shaking experience.” The Possessed, with its disdain for nihilism, became a lifelong touchstone; “for almost twenty years,” he writes in the foreword to this adapta­tion, “I have visualized its characters on the stage.” The enigmatic Stavrogin, the gentle Shatov, and the God-haunted Kirilov are here reinvigorated by Camus’s own moral conviction. Drawing on hundreds of pages from Dostoevsky’s notebooks, he sought to preserve the “thread of suffering and affection that makes Dosto­evsky’s universe so close to each of us.”

    The last finished work before Camus’s death, The Possessed premiered in 1959—with Camus himself directing. The play ran for four hours, with thirty-three actors and seven sets, and was an artistic and techni­cal triumph. More than six decades later, its themes of political violence and ideological extremism are no less potent. As Adam Gopnik concludes in a new introduc­tion: “A play written as a summation of the madness of the middle of the twentieth century, The Possessed remains a warning to the first quarter of our own.”

    Author

    ALBERT CAMUS was born in Algeria in 1913. He spent the early years of his life in North Africa, where he became a journalist. During World War II, he was one of the leading writers of the French Resistance and an editor of Combat, an underground newspaper he helped found. His fiction, including The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall, and Exile and the Kingdom; his philosophical essays The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel and his plays The Just Assassins, The Misunderstanding, and Caligula have assured his preeminent position in modern literature and philosophy. In 1957, Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. On January 4, 1960, he was killed in a car accident. View titles by Albert Camus

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