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The Possessed (Cyclopedia of Literary Places)

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Places Discussed

Provincial capital. Unnamed town that Dostoevski modeled on the city of Tver (located approximately one hundred miles northwest of Moscow), where he spent five months in 1859. The town is the site of much of the novel’s activity, which tends to cluster in one of the following locations: a drawing room in the house of Mrs. Stavrogin (the mother of the novel’s central figure, Nikolai Stavrogin); the rooms inhabited by Stepan Verkhovensky, Nikolai Stavrogin’s childhood tutor and a longtime friend of Mrs. Stavrogin’s; the residence of the provincial...

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