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...