Demons (Penguin Classics)

Product Information

Much of the plot develops out of the tension between belief and non-belief, and the words and actions of most of the characters seem to be intimately bound to the position they take up within this struggle. She berates Stepan Trofimovich for his financial irresponsibility, but her main preoccupation is an "intrigue" she encountered in Switzerland concerning her son and his relations with Liza Tushina—the beautiful daughter of her friend Praskovya. He receives payments for her care from Stavrogin, but he mistreats her and squanders the money on himself. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics the Russian philosopher and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin describes Dostoevsky's literary style as polyphonic, with the cast of individual characters being a multiplicity of " voice-ideas", restlessly asserting and defining themselves in relation to each other. During this time, he appears to have abandoned his former convictions, becoming a devout believer and defender of Russian traditions.

However, despite giving freedom to his imagination, Dostoevsky took great pains to derive the novel's characters and story from real people and real ideas of the time. By the time of the events in the novel Shatov has completely rejected his former convictions and become a passionate defender of Russia's Christian heritage.

Despite being a secondary character, he has a surprisingly intimate knowledge of all the characters and events, such that the narrative often seems to metamorphose into that of the omniscient third person.

At every opportunity he uses his prodigious verbal abilities to sow discord and manipulate people for his own political ends. The first is in anecdotal form, told by the narrator after the pranksters associated with Julia Mikaylovna pay a visit to the scene of a suicide. The father and son are a representation of the aetiological connection Dostoevsky perceived between the liberal idealists of the 1840s and the nihilistic revolutionaries of the 1860s.

A particularly nice touch is how Pyotr Stepanovich boasts that he has tricked his subordinates into thinking that they are part of a wider organisation with branches all across Russia, affiliated to the Internationale (no doubt based on Marx’s own, which was reaching its end just as Dostoevsky was writing). While inspiring Shatov with the ecstatic image of the Russian Christ, Stavrogin was simultaneously encouraging Kirillov toward the logical extremes of atheism - the absolute supremacy of the human will.

We learn that the demon-possessed man is Russia, that the ‘demons’ are revolutionary ideas, and that the ‘demons’ will enter into the ‘swine’ represented by individuals like Pyotr Stepanovich and co, who will destroy themselves and purify the land. Dostoevsky saw Russia's growing suicide rate as a symptom of the decline of religious faith and the concomitant disintegration of social institutions like the family. As a young man Dostoevsky himself was a member of a radical organisation (the Petrashevsky Circle), for which he was arrested and exiled to a Siberian prison camp. Under interrogation from Pyotr Stepanovich, Captain Lebyadkin reluctantly confirms the truth of the whole story.Ivanov was a former member of the group who had chosen to defect, and was killed for fear he would inform. Stavrogin was partly based on Dostoevsky's comrade from the Petrashevsky Circle, Nikolay Speshnev, and represented an imagined extreme in practice of an amoral, atheistic philosophy like that of Max Stirner. Stavrogin, while he seems to accept Pyotr Stepanovich acting on his behalf, is largely unresponsive to these overtures and continues to pursue his own agenda. In the following years he published his most enduring and successful books, including Crime and Punishment (1865).

The idealistic, Western-influenced intellectuals of the 1840s, epitomized in the character of Stepan Verkhovensky (who is both Pyotr Verkhovensky's father and Nikolai Stavrogin's childhood teacher), are presented as the unconscious progenitors and helpless accomplices of the "demonic" forces that take possession of the town.

He was originally a serf belonging to Stepan Trofimovich, but was sold into the army to help pay his master's gambling debts.