This essay aims to explain the attraction toward the main character Stavrogin that the other characters experience in Dostoevsky's The Possessed, his great novel from 1871. I will mainly employ the terms “orientation” and “disorientation” in my analysis of Stavrogin's power of attraction. The theory used for this reading is principally inspired by Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology – Orientation, Objects, Others (2006), and the meaning I attach to the terms “orientation” and “disorientation” is derived from Ahmed's use of them. Ahmed's queer phenomenology helps us to reflect upon how Stavrogin functions as a point of orientation in the novel. This makes him a demonic influence on the other characters, in the sense that he disorientates them.

The Possessed asks us what happens when we “lose our way”, and confusion as well as disorientation is a general theme of the novel. This topic has been raised before, but few have connected the demonic disorientation with the underlying unconventional desires, such as Peter Verchovensky's desire for Stavrogin. In this essay I attempt to show how Stavrogin can be thought of as a “new” orientation for the other characters, and how their following him causes them to follow lines that lead to destruction.