Demons Read online

  Dostoevsky combines all these pages of irresistible satirical comedy with what seems to be their very opposite, the tragic theme of an unsuccessful quest for religious faith and personal salvation by 'a great sinner'. He has often been criticized for attempting to unite what seems, at first sight, to be such disparate material; but this criticism misunderstands the nature of his genius, and measures him by standards that are quite irrelevant to his poetics. Dostoevsky was one of the few novelists of the nineteenth century (rivalled in this respect perhaps only by Balzac) who could still feel the universe and human life as directly related to the ultimate questions about human life that are posed and answered only by religion. This is one reason why, in reading him, one is so constantly reminded of works produced in the great eras of poetic tragedy, when the relationship of man to the gods or to God was so much more instinctive and spontaneous. In general, characters in the novel do not usually relate their own mundane problems and dilemmas so immediately to the 'accursed questions' that always remained in the foreground of Dostoevsky's purview.

  It is no accident that, in The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan speaks nostalgically of the time when 'it was customary to bring down heavenly powers on earth' in literature, and mentions Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris as a modern novel in which a mystery play of this kind is depicted — one in which the Virgin Mary descends to earth. Dostoevsky, it might be said, tried to do the same with the world of the Virgin Mary (or to use a more Russian appellation, the Mother of God) in his own mode of 'fantastic realism', which remained within the realistic conventions of the nineteenth-century novel but enormously extended their usual range. He made realism 'fantastic' by using the extreme situations of melodrama or the criminal adventure novel, which he then elevated to the level of high tragedy by handling their sordid conflicts in terms of the transcendent values of religious faith. For him, the Machiavellianism of Pyotr Verkhovensky, purely social-political in nature, issued the same challenge to the moral basis of human life and society as did the personal experiment of Stavrogin to abolish his feeling for the distinction between good and evil. Both, in Dostoevsky's imagination, derived from the Western rationalism that he saw as inevitably leading to the replacement of the God-man Christ, with his morality of love, by the Man-god of egoism and power embodied in Stavrogin, Pyotr, and most nobly of all in Kirillov. It was because Dostoevsky possessed so acute a sense of this relation between the religious and the social that he was able to create the unparalleled and artistically viable synthesis between his 'pamphlet' and what he later called his 'poem', which was unfortunately weakened - though by no means destroyed - by the suppression of chapter 9.

  One of the questions that inevitably arises about Demons is whether it should not be judged as an unpardonable slander on the Russian radicals who were valiantly struggling, against impossible odds, to create a brave new world. That the book is certainly hostile to the radicalism of its time goes without saying, but to call it 'slander' is very excessive; this would imply that Dostoevsky deliberately distorted and blackened the historical record so as to depict the radicals in the worst possible light. It is true that Dostoevsky gives the Nechaev affair much more importance than it actually warranted in the context of the time; no such widespread disturbances occurred as are depicted in the novel. But so far as the aims and tactics of Nechaev are concerned, as well as his actions and those of his followers, everything in the novel can be supported by what he and they actually did, or, as their propaganda made clear, would have liked to do if given the chance. Nor, in considering this question, should one overlook - though it is usually hardly noticed - the scathing image equally given of the stupidity of the reaction of the authorities in the person of the pitiful Governor-General von Lembke, whose half-crazed attempt at severity only succeeds in throwing oil on the fire of discontent.

  It is also worth noting that, while the publication of Demons ruined Dostoevsky's standing with Russian progressives and the radical youth (though his repudiation by the young was only temporary), the new groups that began to reorganize in the early 1870s very self-consciously set themseves off from Nechaev and the moral miasma of his methods - which would indicate that Dostoevsky's portrayal of them was hardly as defamatory as has been charged, and possibly may even have had some effect. Moreover, it was not only the anti-radical Dostoevsky who was revolted by Nechaev and his tactics, with all their murderous consequences. Alexander Herzen, too, denounced the propaganda of Nechaev as leading to the provocation and unleashing of 'the worst passions'; and Marx and Engels used the Nechaev affair to have Bakunin and his followers booted out of the First International. 'These all-destroying anarchists,' they declared sententiously, 'who wish to reduce everything to amorphousness and to replace morality by anarchy, carry bourgeois (?) morality to its final extreme.'

  Dostoevsky liked to recite Pushkin's poem, 'The Prophet', at benefit readings, and he was often hailed as 'a prophet' in his own lifetime. Such an accolade was usually stimulated by the references that he made, much like Shatov in the novel, to the future glories of the all-reconciling Christian world civilization that it was the God-given destiny of Russia to bring into being. If anything in his work is truly prophetic, however, it is his depiction of the radicals and the spread of their ideas in Demons. One cannot praise too highly the devastating portrayal of how the 'fashionable' progressive ideas brought from the capital permeate the stagnating provincial society, and how the 'radical chic' of the wife of Governor-General von Lembke, which arouses the envy of Mme Stavrogin herself, only paves the way for such infiltration. The 'birthday party' at the Virginskys', which turns into a meeting of the local progressives, begins as a comic adolescent quarrel between a schoolboy and his female counterpart travelling round the country to raise the consciousness of students; but there is nothing comic about the troubled discovery announced by the radical 'theoretican' Shigalyov, who has been tackling the problem of defining the conditions for achieving the earthly paradise. 'Starting from unlimited freedom,' he has noted to his dismay, 'I conclude with unlimited despotism.' (This has certainly become the most quoted passage in the book.) It is little wonder that a fairly recent (1990) Russian study of the novel should be entitled: Roman—Preduprezhdenie - 'A Novel of Warning'. And the historian and critic Yury Karyakin, writing of the period just after Khrushchev had lifted the curtain on Stalin's crimes against humanity, cites the remark made to him with 'a sorrowful smile' by a friend, 'a typical Stepan Trofimovich', with a doctorate in chemistry and who played the flute: 'But you know, all this is in Demons. I was almost arrested in '36 because I read the novel. Someone denounced me...'

  What is most remarkable, however, is that Dostoevsky still manages to make the dupes of Pyotr so pathetically and appealingly human amidst all their follies and delusions; they are very far from being scoundrels or villains whose motives are base or ignoble. One should always remember that Dostoevsky had himself been involved in a genuine revolutionary conspiracy in 1849 (it was a secret he kept concealed all his life), whose aim had been the abolition of serfdom; and he never accepted the official view that those who plotted against the state should simply be viewed as criminals. Indeed, just a year after Demons had been completed, he admitted in an article that he himself might have become 'a Nechaevist ... in the days of my youth'.

  What he had tried to show in Demons, he explained, was that 'even the purest of hearts and the most innocent of people can be drawn into committing such a monstrous offence'. The group around Nechaev, as he depicts them, are hardly 'the purest and the most innocent', but neither are they vile or fundamentally corrupt. They by no means approve of Pyotr's desire to spread disruption and chaos, nor of his instigation of Shatov's murder; but Dostoevsky understood how mass psychology, as well as fear, could overcome the most recalcitrant. He himself had once called Nikolai Speshnev, the leader of his underground group (very probably a biographical prototype for Stavrogin), his 'Mephistopheles', which meant that he knew how it felt to be persuaded to act against one's will in the name of a sacred cause. The scene in which Pyotr brings his rebellious pack to heel is a masterful lesson in the psycho-dynamics of group persuasion.

  One could go on indefinitely exploring all the riches of Demons on various levels, and its relation both to its author and the period with which it deals. So far as the latter is concerned, it is practically an encyclopedia of the Russian culture of its time, filtered through a witheringly derisive and often grotesquely funny perspective. Nothing in the European novel compares with it, except perhaps Balzac's Les Illusions perdues or Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale - the latter most of all because of its equally disillusioned view of Socialism, more disillusioned, in fact, than Dostoevsky's. For Pyotr Verkhovensky, who is nothing if not self-conscious, declares to Stavrogin, in the scene where he explains his plan to make him Ivan the Tsarevich: 'I'm a crook, not a Socialist, ha ha!' Dostoevsky has hardly been given enough credit for this disclaimer, which allowed Russian critics in the late Stalinist period to argue that he was not in fact attacking Russian radicalism as a whole but only its anarchist wing.

  Once, when evoking his past, Dostoevsky recalled how, even before he had learned to read, 'I used to spend the long winter evenings before going to bed listening ... agape with ecstasy and terror as my parents read aloud from the novels of Ann Radcliffe.' This queen of Gothic mystery thrillers was Dostoevsky's memorable initiatrix to literature, and he never forgot the lessons he absorbed from her during those long winter evenings. His own novelistic technique, as Leonid Grossman pointed out long ago in a classic study, was modelled both on Ann Radcliffe and her successors, especially French ones, who catered to the popular taste for suspense, mystery and narrative surprise. Dostoevsky was the only Russian writer of his stature to employ these Gothic devices, and
he was severely rapped over the knuckles for the 'vulgarity' of doing so (a sniffish and snobbish critical tradition that has been regrettably carried into our own day by Vladimir Nabokov). But Dostoevsky, who unlike his rivals wrote for a living, paid no attention to his detractors, and we should be grateful that he shrugged them off. For Demons is not only a novel that deals with some of the profoundest issues of the modern world, and indeed of human life - it is also a riveting page-turner, a great read, a thriller par excellence that is impossible to put down.

  Joseph Frank

  Joseph Frank is Professor Emeritus in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and Professor Emeritus in Slavic and Comparative Literature from Stanford University. He has just completed a highly acclaimed five-volume study of Dostoevsky's life and work. The second volume, Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography in 1985.

  Select Bibliography

  Edward Wasiolek, The Notebooks for ''The Possessed', tr. Victor Terras, University of Chicago Press, 1968. Not easy reading, but an indispensable document, not only for Demons but for Dostoevsky as a whole. In developing Stavrogin, he raises fundamental issues about all his work.

  W. J. Leatherbarrow, ed., Dostoevsky's The Devils, A Critical Companion, Northwestern University Press, 1999. Four English Slavists (the editor, D. C. Offord, M. V.Jones, R. M. Davison) have collaborated on this recent and excellent group of studies devoted to the novel. They treat in turn of the book's relation to Dostoevsky's biography, the context of contemporary ideas, the problem of narration and narrative technique, and the role of Stepan Trofimovich. The volume also contains selections from the relevant correspondence, and a valuable annotated bibliography.

  Nancy A. Anderson, The Perverted Ideal in Dostoevsky's The Devils, Peter Lang, N.Y., 1997. The only book in English devoted to Demons, a well-balanced and well-informed study.

  Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky, His Life and Work, tr. Michael A. Minihan, Princeton University Press, 1967. Originally published by an émigré scholar in 1947, who was strongly influenced by the religious aspects of Russian Symbolism, the book still retains its value. The chapters on Demons (17 and 18) are a very good synthesis.

  Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871, Princeton University Press, 1995. The volume of my own five-volume study of Dostoevsky that deals with Demons. Chapters 21, 23-25 develop the ideas in my introduction.

  Irving Howe, 'Dostoevsky: The Politics of Salvation', in Politics and the Novel, Horizon Press, 1957, 51-75. A perceptive study, one of the best brief treatments.

  Jacques Catteau, 'Le Christ dans le miroir des grotesques (Les Demons)', in Dostoevsky Studies 4 (1983), 29-36. A suggestive analysis of characters in the novel as distorted Christ-images.

  Philip rahv, 'Dostoevski in the The Possessed', in Essays in Literature and Politics, 1932-1972, Houghton Mifflin, 1978, 107-28. An early political reading, which had a great deal of influence.

  Philip Pomper, Sergei Nechaev, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, N.J., 1979. A sober study of the flamboyant revolutionary so important for Demons.

  By the same author, The Russian Revolutionary Intelligentsia, Harlan Davidson, Inc., 1993. A good, brief introduction to the ideological world within which Dostoevsky wrote.

  Chronology

  DATE

  AUTHOR'S LIFE

  LITERARY CONTEXT

  1823

  Born in Moscow.

  1823-31

  Pushkin: Evgeny Onegin.

  1825

  1830

  Stendhal: Le Rouge el le Noir.

  1833-7

  At school in Moscow.

  1834

  Family purchases estate of Darovoe.

  Pushkin: The Queen of Spades.

  1835

  Balzac: Le Père Goriot.

  1836

  Gogol: The Government Inspector.

  1837

  Death of mother.

  Enters St Petersburg Academy of Military Engineering.

  Dickens: Pickwick Papers.

  Death of Pushkin in duel.

  1839

  Death of father, assumed murdered by serfs.

  Stendhal: La Chartreuse de Parme.

  1840

  Lermontov: A Hero of Our Time.

  1841

  Death of Lermontov in duel.

  1842

  Gogol: Dead Souls and The Overcoat.

  1844

  Graduates, but resigns commission in order to pursue literary career.

  1845

  Completes Poor Folk - acclaimed by the critic Belinsky.

  1846

  Publication of Poor Folk and The Double.

  1847

  Breaks with Belinsky. Joins Petrashevsky circle. 'The Landlady', 'A Novel in Nine Letters', 'A Petersburg Chronicle'.

  Herzen: Who is to Blame? Herzen leaves Russia. Goncharov: An Ordinary Story.

  1848

  'A Faint Heart' and 'White Nights'.

  Death of Belinsky. Thackeray: Vanity Fair.

  1849

  Netochka Nezvanova. Arrested and imprisoned in Peter-and-Paul fortress. Mock execution. Sentenced to hard labour and Siberian exile.

  1850

  Arrives at Omsk penal colony.

  Turgenev: A Month in the Country. Herzen: From the Other Shore. Dickens: David Copperfield.

  1851

  .

  1852

  Tolstoy: Childhood. Turgenev: A Sportsman's Notebook. Death of Gogol.

  1856

  1854

  Posted to Semipalatinsk.

  1855

  1856

  Turgenev: Rudin.

  1857

  Marries Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva.

  Flaubert: Madame Bovary. Baudelaire: Les Fleurs du mal.

  1859

  The Friend of the Family. Returns to St Petersburg.

  Turgenev: A Nest of Gentlefolk. Goncharov: Oblomov. Tolstoy: Family Happiness. Darwin: The Origin of Species.

  1860

  Starts publication of House of the Dead.

  Turgenev: On the Eve.

  George Eliot: The Mill on the Floss.

  Birth of Chekhov.

  1861

  Time commences publication. The Insulted and Injured.

  Dickens: Great Expectations.

  1862

  Travels in Europe. Affair with Polina Suslova.

  Turgenev: Fathers and Children. Hugo: Les Misérables. Chernyshevsky arrested.

  1863

  Further travel abroad. Time closed. Winter Motes on Summer Impressions.