We've read a fair bit of Dostoevsky around here in the past 5 years, and I think Demons is up there with his top flight work (though nothing can compare to The Brothers Karamazov). However, I also found it one of his most difficult works. The novel is presented almost as a mystery or detective story for the first 400 pages. It has an enormous number of characters, forming distinct but partly overlapping groups, and many are introduced only in passing long before they become relevant to the plot. Quite simply, it's very hard to understand where it's all headed for the first two-thirds of the novel. With Dostoevsky's characteristic patient pacing though, the several different intrigues are finally brought together in Part Three, which becomes a real whirlwind. Dostoevsky's page turning climaxes are probably the thing I love most about him, and a good part of their power lies in the long slow buildup to the conflagration.
One of the things I found particularly interesting about this novel was the way that it largely skirts Dostoevsky's traditional themes of religion and philosophy to focus on politics. It does this in a particularly Dostoevskyian way however. The focus is not on the politics per se, but on the personality types who are 'possessed' (as an alternate translation of the title has it) by political ideas. There are total cynics and true believers and simple conformists and every combination of these categories, and actual politics is explored as a result of the interaction of ideas with the various types of human.
So, for example, one of the great political themes of Dostoevsky's era was "nihilism" which the translators helpfully note was a political term in Russia:
We see this political nihilism filtered through several different characters in the novel, each of which give us a sort of refraction of what it might mean on a human level. Stepan is a liberal academic who believes we can make up a new world by the dreams of reason alone, which, in a sense, is where nihilism begins -- with a belief in the solitary efficacy of the human being. While Stepan, as the least efficacious character in the novel, is clearly a parody of this idea, we also see how this thread plays out when it reaches his son Pyotr, who believes in nothing but himself. And then we also have Nikolai and Kirillov, who are so nihilistic that they don't even believe in that. This is how Dostoevsky treats the political world -- various conflicting aspects of a single -ism are embodied in different characters. It really bring politics to life, or perhaps vice versa.
One of the things I found particularly interesting about this novel was the way that it largely skirts Dostoevsky's traditional themes of religion and philosophy to focus on politics. It does this in a particularly Dostoevskyian way however. The focus is not on the politics per se, but on the personality types who are 'possessed' (as an alternate translation of the title has it) by political ideas. There are total cynics and true believers and simple conformists and every combination of these categories, and actual politics is explored as a result of the interaction of ideas with the various types of human.
So, for example, one of the great political themes of Dostoevsky's era was "nihilism" which the translators helpfully note was a political term in Russia:
The term "nihilism," first used philosophically in German (nibilismus) to signify annihilation, a reduction to nothing (attributed to Buddha), or the rejection of religious beliefs and moral principles, came via the French nihilisme to Russian, where it acquired a political meaning, referring to the doctrine of the younger generation of socialists of the 1860s, who advocated the destruction of the existing social order without specifying what should replace it. (pg. 720)
We see this political nihilism filtered through several different characters in the novel, each of which give us a sort of refraction of what it might mean on a human level. Stepan is a liberal academic who believes we can make up a new world by the dreams of reason alone, which, in a sense, is where nihilism begins -- with a belief in the solitary efficacy of the human being. While Stepan, as the least efficacious character in the novel, is clearly a parody of this idea, we also see how this thread plays out when it reaches his son Pyotr, who believes in nothing but himself. And then we also have Nikolai and Kirillov, who are so nihilistic that they don't even believe in that. This is how Dostoevsky treats the political world -- various conflicting aspects of a single -ism are embodied in different characters. It really bring politics to life, or perhaps vice versa.
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