Demons Read online

  Tolstoy: The Cossacks. Chernyshevsky: What is to be Done?

  1864

  Launch of The Epoch. Death of wife and brother. Motes from Underground.

  1865

  The Epoch closes. Severe financial difficulties.

  Dickens: Our Mutual Friend.

  1865-9

  Tolstoy: War and Peace.

  1866

  Crime and Punishment. The Gambler.

  1867

  Marries Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina. Flees abroad to escape creditors.

  Turgenev: Smoke.

  1868

  The Idiot. Birth and death of daughter, Sonya. Visits Switzerland and Italy.

  1869

  Birth of daughter Liubov.

  Flaubert: L'Education sentimentale.

  1870

  The Eternal Husband.

  Death of Dickens and Herzen.

  1871

  Returns to St Petersburg. Birth of son, Fyodor.

  1871-2

  Demons {The Devils/The Possessed).

  1872

  Summer in Staraia Russa -becomes normal summer residence. Becomes editor of The Citizen.

  Marx's Das Kapital published in Russia.

  George Eliot: Middlemarch.

  1873

  Starts Diary of a Writer.

  1874

  Resigns from The Citizen. Seeks treatment for emphysema in Bad Ems.

  1875

  A Raw Youth.

  1875-8

  Tolstoy: Anna Karenina.

  1876

  1877

  Turgenev: Virgin Soil.

  1878

  Birth and death of son, Alexey. Visits Optina monastery with Vladimir Solovyov.

  1879

  1879-80

  The Brothers Karamazov.

  Tolstoy's religious crisis, during which he writes A Confession.

  1880

  Speech at Pushkin celebrations in Moscow.

  Death of Flaubert and George Eliot.

  1881

  Dies of lung haemorrhage. Buried at Alexander Nevsky Monastery, St Petersburg.

  Translators' Note

  Russian names are composed of first name, patronymic (from the father's first name), and family name. Formal address requires the use of first name and patronymic; diminutives are commonly used among family and intimate friends; a shortened form of the patronymic (e.g., Yegorych instead of Yegorovich), used only in speech, also suggests a certain familiarity. Among the aristocracy, who spoke French at least as readily as Russian, the French forms of names were frequently used, such as Julie in place of Yulia. The following list gives the names of the novel's main characters, with their variants. Accented syllables of Russian names are italicized.

  Alexei Yegorovich, or Yegorych (no family name) Drozdov, Mavriky Nikolaevich (Maurice)

  _______, Praskovya Ivanovna. (Drozdikha)

  Erkel (no first name or patronymic)

  Fyodor Fyodorovich, called 'Fedka the Convict' (no family name) Gaganov, Artemy Pavlovich

  ______, Pavel Pavlovich

  G___v, Anton Lavrentievich

  Karmazinov, Semyon Yegorovich

  Kirillov, Alexei Nilych

  Lebyadkin, Ignat (patronymic 'Timofeevich' never used)

  _______, Marya Timofeeevna, or Timofevna

  Liputin, Sergei Yegorovich (or Vasilyich)

  Lyamshin (no first name or patronymic) Matryosha (no patronymic or family name) Semyon Yakovlevich (no family name) Shatov, Darya Pavlovna (Dasha)

  ______, Ivan Pavlovich (Shatushka)

  ______, Marya Ignatievna (Marie)

  Shigalyov (no first name or patronymic) Stavrogin, Nikolai Vsevolodovich (Nicolas) _______, Varvara Petrovna

  Tikhon

  Tolkachenko (no first name or patronymic) Tushin, Lizaveta Nikolaevna (Liza, Lise) Ulitin, Sofya Matveevna Verkhovensky, Pyotr Stepanovich (Petrusha, Pierre)

  _______, Stepan Trofimovich

  Virginsky (no first name or patronymic)

  _______, Arina Prokhorovna von Blum, Andrei Antonovich von Lembke, Andrei Antonovich (also called 'Lembka')

  _______, Yulia Mikhailovna (Julie)

  The name 'Stavrogin' comes from the Greek word stavros, meaning 'cross'. 'Shatov' comes from the Russian verb shatat'sya, 'to loosen, become unsteady, wobble', and, by extension, 'to waver, vacillate'. The name 'Verkhovensky' is rich in suggestions for the Russian ear: verkh means 'top, head, height'; verkhovny means 'chief, supreme'; verkhovenstvo means 'command, leadership'.

  We include as an appendix the chapter 'At Tikhon's', which was suppressed by M. N. Katkov, editor of the Russian Messenger, where Demons first appeared serially. Dostoevsky valued this chapter highly, but after efforts to salvage it, none of which satisfied his editor, he was forced to eliminate it. Since he never restored it to later editions of the novel, we have chosen, as most editors have, to print it as an appendix, rather than put it back in its rightful place as Chapter Nine of the second part.

  The chapter has survived in two forms, neither of which can be considered finished. The first version is in printer's proofs for the December 1871 issue of the Russian Messenger, corresponding to the manuscript Dostoevsky originally submitted to Katkov. The fifteenth page of these proofs is missing, however, and the proofs themselves are covered with additions and alterations made at different times and representing Dostoevsky's attempts to rework the chapter. The second version is a fair copy written out by Anna Grigorievna Dostoevsky, the author's wife, from an unknown manuscript. It differs considerably from the proof text, and essentially constitutes a distinct version. It, too, was never finished or published. Our translation of 'At Tikhon's' has been made from the proof text, reproduced in volume II of the Soviet Academy of Sciences edition of Dostoevsky's works (Leningrad, 1974), omitting later additions and alterations, and with the lost fifteenth page restored from the corresponding passage in Anna Grigorievna's manuscript.

  Richard Pevear has published translations of Alain, Yves Bonnefoy, Albert Savinio and Pavel Florensky as well as two books of poetry. Larissa Volokhonsky has translated the work of prominent Orthodox theologians Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff. Together they are known for their highly acclaimed translations of Dostoevsky's novels. Their new English version of The Brothers Karamazov was awarded the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize.

  DEMONS

  Upon my life, the tracks have vanished,

  We've lost our way, what shall we do?

  It must be a demon's leading us

  This way and that around the fields.

  How many are there? Where have they flown to?

  Why do they sing so plaintively?

  Are they burying some household goblin?

  Is it some witch's wedding day?

  A. S. Pushkin, "Demons"

  Now a large herd of swine was feeding there on the hillside; and they begged him to let them enter these. So he gave them leave. Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned.

  When the herdsmen saw what had happened, they fled, and told it in the city and in the country. Then people went out to see what had happened, and they came to Jesus, and found the man from whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind; and they were afraid. And those who had seen it told them how he who had been possessed with demons was healed.

  Luke 8:32-36 (rsv)

  Part One

  1: Instead of an Introduction

  A few details from the biography of the much esteemed Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky

  I

  In setting out to describe the recent and very strange events that took place in our town, hitherto not remarkable for anything, I am forced, for want of skill, to begin somewhat far back—namely, with some biographical details concerning the talented and much esteemed Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky. Let these details serve merely as an introduction to the chronicle presented here, while the story itself, which I am intending to relate, still lies ahead.

  I will say straight off: Stepan Trofimovich constantly played a certain special and, so to speak, civic role among us, and loved this role to the point of passion—so much so that it even seems to me he would have been unable to live without it. Not that I equate him with a stage actor: God forbid, particularly as I happen to respect him. It could all have been a matter of habit, or, better, of a ceaseless and noble disposition, from childhood on, towards a pleasant dream of his beautiful civic stance. He was, for example, greatly enamored of his position as a "persecuted" man and, so to speak, an "exile."[1] There is a sort of classical luster to these two little words that seduced him once and for all, and, later raising him gradually in his own estimation over the course of so many years, brought him finally to some sort of pedestal, rather lofty and gratifying to his vanity. In a satirical English novel of the last century, a certain Gulliver, having returned from the land of the Lilliputians, where people were only some three inches tall, had grown so accustomed to considering himself a giant among them that even when walking in the streets of London, he could not help shouting at passers-by and carriages to move aside and take care that he not somehow crush them, imagining that he was still a giant and they were little. For which people laughed at him and abused him, and rude coachmen even struck the giant with their whips—but was that fair? What will habit not do to a man? Habit brought Stepan Trofimovich to much the same thing, but in a still more innocent and inoffensive form, if one may put it so, for he was a most excellent man.

  I even think that towards the end he was forgotten by everyone everywhere; but it is by no means possible to say that he had been completely unknown earlier as well. It is unquestionable that he, too, belonged for a while to the famous plei
ad of some renowned figures of our previous generation, and for a time—though only for one brief little moment—his name was uttered by many hurrying people of that day almost on a par with the names of Chaadaev, Belinsky, Granovsky, and Herzen, who was just beginning abroad.[2] But Stepan Trofimovich's activity ended almost the moment it began—due, so to speak, to a "whirlwind of concurrent circumstances."[3] And just think! It turned out later that there had been not only no "whirlwind" but not even any "circumstances," at least not on that occasion. Just the other day I learned, to my great surprise, but now with perfect certainty, that Stepan Trofimovich had lived among us, in our province, not only not in exile, as we used to think, but that he had never even been under surveillance. Such, then, is the power of one's own imagination! He himself sincerely believed all his life that he was a cause of constant apprehension in certain spheres, that his steps were ceaselessly known and numbered, and that each of the three governors who succeeded one another over the past twenty years, in coming to rule our province, brought along a certain special and worrisome idea of him, inspired from above and before all, upon taking over the province. Had someone then convinced the most honest Stepan Trofimovich, on irrefutable evidence, that he had nothing at all to fear, he would no doubt have been offended. And yet he was such an intelligent man, such a gifted man, even, so to speak, a scholar—though as a scholar, however... well, in a word, he did very little as a scholar, nothing at all, apparently. But with scholars here in Russia that is ever and always the case.

  He returned from abroad and shone briefly as a lecturer at the university back at the end of the forties. But he managed to give only a few lectures, apparently on the Arabians; he also managed to defend a brilliant thesis on the nearly emerged civic and Hanseatic importance of the German town of Hanau, in the period between 1413 and 1428,[4] together with the peculiar and vague reasons why that importance never took place. This thesis cleverly and painfully needled the Slavophils[5] of the day, and instantly gained him numerous and infuriated enemies among them. Later—though by then he had already lost his lectureship—he managed to publish (in revenge, so to speak, and to show them just whom they had lost), in a monthly and progressive journal, which translated Dickens and preached George Sand,[6] the beginning of a most profound study—having to do, apparently, with the reasons for the remarkable moral nobility of some knights in some epoch, or something of the sort. At any rate, some lofty and remarkably noble idea was upheld in it. Afterwards it was said that the sequel of the study was promptly forbidden, and that the progressive journal even suffered for having printed the first part. That could very well have happened, because what did not happen back then? But in the present case it is more likely that nothing happened, and that the author himself was too lazy to finish the study. And he stopped his lectures on the Arabians because someone (evidently from among his retrograde enemies) somehow intercepted a letter to someone giving an account of some "circumstances," as a result of which someone demanded some explanations from him. I do not know if it is true, but it was also asserted that in Petersburg at the same time they unearthed a vast anti-natural, anti-state society of some thirteen members which all but shook the foundations. It was said that they supposedly intended to translate Fourier himself.[7] As if by design, at the same time in Moscow they seized a poem by Stepan Trofimovich, written six years earlier in Berlin, in his first youth, which circulated in manuscript among two amateurs and one student. This poem is now also sitting in my desk drawer; I received it just last year, in a quite recent copy, handwritten by Stepan Trofimovich himself, with his inscription, and bound in magnificent red morocco. Incidentally, it is not lacking in poetry, or even in a certain talent; it is a strange piece, but in those days (that is, more precisely, in the thirties) that kind of thing was not uncommon. I find it difficult to give the plot, because to tell the truth I understand nothing of it. It is some sort of allegory, in lyrical-dramatic form, resembling the second part of Faust.[8] The scene opens with a chorus of women, then a chorus of men, then of some powers, and it all ends with a chorus of souls that have not lived yet but would very much like to live a little. All these choruses sing about something very indefinite, mostly about somebody's curse, but with a tinge of higher humor. Then suddenly the scene changes and some sort of "Festival of Life" begins, in which even insects sing, a turtle appears with some sort of sacramental Latin words, and, if I remember, a mineral—that is, an altogether inanimate object—also gets to sing about something. Generally, everyone sings incessantly, and if they speak, they squabble somehow indefinitely, but again with a tinge of higher meaning. Finally, the scene changes again, and a wild place appears, where a civilized young man wanders among the rocks picking and sucking at some wild herbs, and when a fairy asks him why he is sucking these herbs, he responds that he feels an overabundance of life in himself, is seeking oblivion, and finds it in the juice of these herbs, but that his greatest desire is to lose his reason as quickly as possible (a perhaps superfluous desire). Suddenly a youth of indescribable beauty rides in on a black horse, followed by a terrible multitude of all the nations. The youth represents death, and all the nations yearn for it. Finally, in the very last scene, the Tower of Babel suddenly appears and some athletes finally finish building it with a song of new hope, and when they have built to the very top, the proprietor of, shall we say, Olympus flees in comical fashion, and quick-witted mankind takes over his place and at once begins a new life with a new perception of things. Well, this is the poem that was found so dangerous then. Last year I proposed to Stepan Trofimovich to publish it, in view of its perfect innocence nowadays, but he declined the proposal with obvious displeasure. My opinion as to its perfect innocence he did not like, and I even ascribe to it a certain coolness towards me on his part, which lasted for a whole two months. And just think! Suddenly, almost at the same time as I proposed publishing it here, our poem was published there—that is, abroad, in one of the revolutionary miscellanies, and absolutely without Stepan Trofimovich's knowledge. He was frightened at first, rushed to the governor, and wrote a most noble letter of vindication to Petersburg, read it to me twice, but did not send it, not knowing to whom to address it. In short, he was worried for a whole month; but I am convinced that in the hidden turnings of his heart he was remarkably flattered. He all but slept with the copy of the miscellany that had been sent to him, hid it under the mattress during the day, and even would not allow the woman to make his bed, and though he expected any day some telegram from somewhere, his look was haughty. No telegram came. And then he reconciled with me, which testifies to the extreme kindness of his gentle and unresentful heart.

  II

  I am by no means claiming that he never suffered at all; only I am now fully convinced that he could have gone on with his Arabians as much as he liked, if he had simply given the necessary explanations. But at the time he made a grand gesture, and with particular hastiness took care to convince himself once and for all that his career had been ruined for the whole of his life by a "whirlwind of circumstances." Though, if one were to tell the whole truth, the real reason for this change of career was a most delicate offer, made once before and now renewed by Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin, the wife of a lieutenant general and a woman of considerable wealth, to take upon himself the upbringing and the whole intellectual development of her only son, in the capacity of a superior pedagogue and friend, to say nothing of a splendid remuneration. This offer had first been made to him in Berlin, and precisely at the time when he had first been left a widower. His first wife was a flighty girl from our province whom he had married in his very first and still reckless youth, and it seems he suffered much grief from this—incidentally attractive—person, for lack of means to support her, and for other, somewhat delicate reasons as well. She died in Paris, having been separated from him for the previous three years, leaving him a five-year-old son, "the fruit of a first, joyful, and still unclouded love," as once escaped the sorrowing Stepan Trofimovich in my presence. The nestling was from the very start sent back to Russia, where he was brought up all the while in the hands of some distant aunts, somewhere in a remote corner. Stepan Trofimovich had declined Varvara Petrovna's offer at that time and quickly got married again, even before the year was out, to a taciturn little German woman from Berlin, and that, moreover, without any special need. But there turned out to be other reasons, besides, for declining the position of tutor: he was tempted by the then resounding glory of one unforgettable professor, and in his turn flew to the chair for which he had been preparing himself, to try out his own eagle's wings. And so now, with his wings singed, he naturally recalled the offer that had already once made him hesitate. The sudden death of his second wife, who did not live even a year with him, finally settled it all. I will say straight out: it was all resolved through Varvara Petrovna's fervent sympathy and precious, so to speak, classical friendship for him, if one may thus express oneself about friendship. He threw himself into the embrace of this friendship, and the thing got set for more than twenty years. I have used the expression "threw himself into the embrace," but God forbid that anyone should think anything idle and unwarranted; this embrace should be understood only in the highest moral sense. The most subtle and delicate bond united these two so remarkable beings forever.