The Intimate Stranger provides the first detailed investigation of a distinctive literary phenomenon: a fascination with demons and devils in nineteenth-century Russian literature. Nearly all of the major authors of the period Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy used images of devils to explore issues of human temptation, sin, and guilt in a troubled world. Asking fundamental questions where does evil come from? when does it appear in characters lives? these writers created a remarkable array of demonic figures, ranging from grotesque demons to handsome nihilists. This...