I was in high school when I first read a Russian novel; it was Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The book immediately grabbed my attention – here was something to really sink my teeth into, something that dealt with the Big Questions. Later in high school we also read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, which did nothing for me. I think maybe I didn’t understand it at the time.

In college I took a course in Russian literature (in translation; I can’t speak a word of Russian except da, nyet, and dacha). That was a very deep dive into writers both famous and to me obscure. I can’t remember all the books we studied, but one of them was Demons by Dostoevsky. Our translation was titled The Possessed. Here are the themes, and I think you’ll see their relevance to both the late 1960s, when I took that course, and now [my emphasis]:

A fictional town descends into chaos as it becomes the focal point of an attempted revolution, orchestrated by master conspirator Pyotr Verkhovensky. The mysterious aristocratic figure of Nikolai Stavrogin—Verkhovensky’s counterpart in the moral sphere—dominates the book, exercising an extraordinary influence over the hearts and minds of almost all the other characters. 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. …

Dostoevsky’s nihilists are portrayed in their ordinary human weakness, drawn into the world of destructive ideas through vanity, naïveté, idealism, and the susceptibility of youth. In re-imagining Nechayev’s orchestration of the murder, Dostoevsky was attempting to “depict those diverse and multifarious motives by which even the purest of hearts and the most innocent of people can be drawn in to committing such a monstrous offence.” In A Writer’s Diary, he discusses the relationship of the ideas of his own generation to those of the current generation, and suggests that in his youth he too could have become a follower of someone like Nechayev. 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. Dostoevsky was an active participant in a secret revolutionary society formed from among the members of the Petrashevsky Circle. The cell’s founder and leader, the aristocrat Nikolay Speshnev, is thought by many commentators to be the principal inspiration for the character of Stavrogin. …

Dostoevsky wrote that “Communism will conquer one day, irrespective of whether the Communists are right or wrong. But this triumph will stand very far from the Kingdom of Heaven. All the same, we must accept that this triumph will come one day, even though none of those who at present steer the world’s fate have any idea about it at all.”

Since the Russian Revolution, many commentators have remarked on the prophetic nature of Demons. André Gide, writing in the early 1920s, suggested that “the whole of (the novel) prophesies the revolution of which Russia is presently in the throes”. In Soviet Russia, a number of dissident authors found a prototype for the Soviet police state in the system expounded by Shigalev at the meeting of Pyotr Verkhovensky’s revolutionary society. …

Dostoevsky biographer Ronald Hingley described the novel as “an awesome, prophetic warning which humanity, no less possessed of collective and individual devilry in the 1970s than in the 1870s, shows alarmingly few signs of heeding.” … In his book Dostoyevsky in Manhattan French philosopher André Glucksmann argued that ‘nihilism’, as depicted in Demons, is the underlying idea or ‘characteristic form’ of modern terrorism.

There are patterns of human behavior, and this appears to be one. I recognized that even in the 1960s, and it somewhat inoculated me against some of the worst excesses of those times, and of leftism in general.