The Possessed, Albert Camus
Originally published in French as 1959
FOREWORD
The Possessed is one of the four or five works that I rank above all others. In many ways I can claim that I grew up on it and took sustenance from it. For almost twenty years, in any event, I have visualized its characters on the stage. Besides having the stature of dramatic characters, they have the appropriate behavior, the explosions, the swift and disconcerting gait. Moreover, Dostoevsky uses a theater technique in his novels: he works through dialogues with few indications as to place and action. A man of the theater—whether actor, director, or author—always finds in him all the suggestions he needs.
And now THE POSSESSED has reached the stage after several years of labor and persistence. And yet I am well aware of all that separates the play from that amazing novel! I merely tried to follow the book’s undercurrent and to proceed as it does from satiric comedy to drama and then to tragedy. Both the original and the dramatic adaptation start from a certain realism and endup in tragic stylization. As for the rest, I tried, amidst this vast, preposterous, panting world full of outbursts and scenes of violence, never to lose the thread of suffering and affection that makes Dostoevsky’s universe so close to each of us.
Dostoevsky’s characters, as we know well by now, are neither odd nor absurd. They are like us; we have the same heart. And if THE POSSESSED is a prophetic book, this is not only because it prefigures our nihilism, but also because its protagonists are torn or dead souls unable to love and suffering from that inability, wanting to believe and yet unable to do so like those who people our society and our spiritual world today. The subject of this work is just as much the murder of Shatov (inspired by a real event—the assassination of the student Ivanov by the nihilist Nechayev) as the spiritual adventure and death of Stavrogin, a contemporary hero. Hence we have dramatized not only one of the masterpieces of world literature but also a work of current application.
ALBERT CAMUS
N.B. The adaptation of THE POSSESSED reintegrates into the work Stavrogin1 s confession (which was not published because of censorship, though its place in the narrative is known to us) and utilizes the several hundred pages that make up the NOTEBOOKS of THE POSSESSED kept by the author while he was writing the novel.
FIRST PART
GRIGORIEV, the narrator STEPAN TROFIMQVICH VERKHOVENSKY VARVARA PETROVNA STAVROGIN
LIPUTIN SHIGALOV IVAN SHATOV VIRGINSKY GAGANOV
ALEXEY YEGOROVICH NICHOLAS STAVROGIN PRASCOVYA DROZDOV DASHA SHATOV ALEXEY KIRILOV
LISA DROZDOV MAURICE NICOLAEVICH MARIA TIMOFEYEVNA LEBYATKIN
CAPTAIN LEBYATKIN PETER STEPANOVICH VERKHOVENSKY FEDKA
THE SEMINARIAN LYAMSHIN BISHOP TIHON GAGANOV’S SON MARIA SHATOV
NOTE: The necessities of stage production called for fairly numerous cuts in the text of the adaptation. This edition contains all the passages and scenes cut in the production. They have been set between brackets.
SETS
- At Varvara Stavrogin’s. A luxurious period drawing room.
- Filipov’s poor rooming house. Double set, representing a living room and a small bedroom.
- The street.
- Lebyatkin’s dwelling. A wretched living room in the suburb.
- The forest.
- At Tihon’s. A vast hall in the Convent of the Virgin.
- The main drawing room in the Stavrogin countryhouse, at Skvoreshniki.
FIRST PART
When the theater is altogether dark, a spotlight picks out the NARRATOR standing in front of the curtain with hat in hand.
ANTON GRIGORIEV, the NARRATOR (cOUrteOUS, COlmy and ironic)
Ladies and Gentlemen
The strange events you are about to witness took place in our provincial city under the influence of my esteemed friend Professor Stepan Troflmovich Verkhovensky. The Professor had always played a thoroughly patriotic role among us. He was liberal and idealistic, loving the West, progress, justice, and generally everything lofty. But on those heights he unfortunately fell to imagining that the Tsar and his Ministers had a particular grudge against him, and he settled among us to play the part of the persecuted thinker in exile. It must be said that he did so with great dignity. Simply, three or four times a year he had attacks of patriotic melancholy that kept him in bed with a hotwater bottle on his belly.
He lived in the house of his friend Varvara Stavrogin, the widow of the General, who, after her husband’s death, had entrusted to him the upbringing of her son, Nicholas Stavrogin. Oh, I forgot to tell you that Stepan Troflmovich was twice widowed and once a father. He had shipped his son abroad. Both his wives had died young, and, to tell the truth, they hadn’t been very happy with him.
But it is hardly possible to love one’s wife and justice at the same time. Consequently, Stepan Trofimovich transferred all his affection to his pupil, Nicholas Stavrogin, to whose moral education he applied himself most rigorously until Nicholas fled home and took to indulging in wild debauch. Hence, Stepan Trofimovich remained alone with Varvara Stavrogin, who felt an unlimited friendship for him—in other words, she often hated him. That is where my story begins.
SCENE 1
The curtain rises on Varvara Stavrogin’s draining room. The NARRATOR goes over and sits down at the table to play cards with STEPAN TROFIMOVICH.
STEPAN: Oh, I forgot to ask you to cut the cards. Forgive me, Anton, but I didn’t sleep well at all last night. How I regretted having complained to you of Varvara!
GRIGORIEV: You merely said she was keeping you out of vanity and that she was jealous of your education.
STEPAN: That’s what I mean. But it’s not true! Your turn. You see, she’s an angel of honor and sensitivity, and I’m just the reverse.
(VARVARA STAVROGIN comes in, but stops at the door.)
VARVARA: Cards again! (They rise.) Sit down and go on. I am busy. (She goes over to look at some papers on a table at the left. They continue playing, but STEPAN TROFIMOVICH keeps glancing at VARVARA STAVROGIN, who finally speaks, avoiding his eyes.) I thought you were to work on your book this morning.
STEPAN: I took a walk in the garden. I had taken Tocqueville under my arm.
VARVARA: And you read Paul de Kock instead. But you have been announcing your book for fifteen years now.
STEPAN: Yes, I have gathered the material, but I have to put it together. It doesn’t matter anyway! I am forgotten. No one needs me. VARVARA: You would be less forgotten if you played cards less often.
STEPAN: Yes, I play cards. And it’s unworthy of me. But who is responsible? Who nipped my career in the bud? Ah, que meure la Russie! I’ll trump that.
VARVARA: Nothing keeps you from working and from proving by your work that people were wrong to neglect you.
STEPAN: You are forgetting, chere amie, that I have published a great deal.
VARVARA: Indeed? Who remembers that now? STEPAN: Who? Why, our friend here certainly remembers it.
GRIGORIEV: Of course I do. To begin with, your lectures on the nature of the Arabs, then the start of your study on the exceptional moral nobility of certain knights at a certain period, and, above all, your thesis on the importance that the small city of Hanau might have achieved between 1413 and 1428 if it had not been prevented from doing so by halfhidden causes, which you analyzed brilliantly.
STEPAN: You have a memory like a steel trap, Anton. Thank you.
VARVARA: That is not the point. The point is that for fifteen years you have been announcing a book and you haven’t written a single word of it.
STEPAN: Of course not, that would be too easy!
I want to be sterile and solitary! That will teach them what they have lost. I want to be a living reproach!
VARVARA: You would be if you spent less time in bed.
STEPAN: What?
VARVARA: Yes, to be a living reproach one has to stand on one’s feet.
STEPAN: Standing up or lying down, the important thing is to personify the idea. Besides, I am active, I am active, and always according to my principles. This very week I signed a protest. VARVARA: Against what?
STEPAN: I don’t know. It was . . . oh, I’ve forgotten. // fallait protester, voila tout. Oh, in my time everything was different. I used to work twelve hours a day. . . .
VARVARA: Five or six would have been enough. . . .
STEPAN: I used to spend hours in the library gathering mountains of notes. We had hope then! We used to talk until daybreak, building the future. Oh, how noble we were then, strong as steel, firm as the Rock of Gibraltar! Those were evenings truly worthy of Athens: music, Spanish melodies, love of humanity, the Sistine Madonna . . . O ma noble et fidele amie, have you any idea of all I gave up?
VARVARA: No. (She rises.) But I know that if you talked until dawn you couldn’t work twelve hours a day. Besides, all this is mere talk! You know that at long last I am expecting my son, Nicholas, any moment. … I must have a word
with you. (GRIGORIEV gets up, comes over, and kisses her hand.) Thank you, Anton, you are discreet. Stay in the garden and you can come back later.
(GRIGORIEV leaves.)
STEPAN: Quel bonheur, ma noble amie, de revoir notre Nicolas!
VARVARA: Yes, I am very happy. He is my whole life. But I am worried.
STEPAN: Worried?
VARVARA: Yes—don’t act like a male nurse—I am worried. By the way, since when have you been wearing red neckties?
STEPAN: Why, just today I—
VARVARA: It doesn’t suit your age, in my opinion. Where was I? Yes, I am worried. And you know very well why. All those rumors … I can’t believe them, and yet I can’t forget them. Debauchery,
