Dostoevsky’s Demons
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.
You know more than three words of Russian: tsar, soviet, glasnost, perestroika, vodka, mir, soyuz.
Russian lit is dark stuff. In the 80s and 90s I got into Vladimir Voinovich, who got exiled. He wrote about the despair he felt living in Germany, watching scenes in Moscow’s shopping district. The female narrator is talking of long lines in GUM, the department store, leading to the purchase of the most mundane things easily obtained in the west.
“All of this bounty are the result of Soviet socialism, for the world to envy,” the narrator says. She’s bragging and has no idea her audience is embarrassed for her.
And Voinovich was a humorist.
bof:
But I thought those were English! 🙂
“Dostoevsky wrote that “Communism will conquer one day, irrespective of whether the Communists are right or wrong.”
His prediction seems to be coming true. Even though we thought Communism was over when the Berlin Wall and the USSR fell. Francis Fukuyama wrote that it was “The End of History.” Don’t we wish.
I see the Progressive movement in the USA as basically Marxist. They don’t go around preaching Marxist slogans or calling themselves Comrade, but they seem to hate the government and economy that has been created here. They want a centrally run economy and a state that takes care of everyone. The worst part is that, in spite of the evidence against their ideas, they believe it’s possible.
It’s a fact of human nature that there will always be those who want to tell everyone else what to do and how to do it. And those who want someone like the government (a father figure) to take care of them. They believe it can be done. And they’re willing to kill/ruin any number of people to make it happen. They pursue this from a stance of virtue, ad despise the immoral “fascists” that stand in their way.
J.J.:
Well, it certainly already “conquered” in Russia, although Dostoevsky wrote long before that happened. But it didn’t conquer forever. And it may or may not “conquer” here. The world keep approaching and then retreating from it.
“The world keep approaching and then retreating from it.” – Neo
Yes, it’s like a Vampire. No one seems to know how to put a stake through its heart. And it’s such an attractive myth – it keeps capturing new believers over time.
It is part of the greater heresy that lewis touched in his work ‘you shall be as gods’ the West has indulged in these notions steering away from foundational truth
Tolstoy certainly turned away from what he considered the harsh Orthodox Christianity toward Humanism which was a variant of the rousseau will to power
I took two Russian history courses and two lit courses in college. Russian writers are very good at detecting sin, but not so good at describing salvation.
Russian writers are very good at detecting sin, but not so good at describing salvation.
I like that. Very good.
I’ve read all of three Russian novels. War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and Crime and Punishment. All were brilliant. Crime and Punishment easily the most difficult read – so bleak. But of course, that was intentional.
I read both Crime & Punishment & Lady Chattertley’s Lover when I was 12 or 13. Yikes! I was the youngest in my family, and while I wasn’t neglected, I was given a lot of latitude. I should not have been pulling those off the bookshelf at that age.
Of course, then I was hooked. More & more Dostoyevski & Lawrence. I had no idea what literature experts thought of those works, but the messages came through pretty clearly, regardless.
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“The Demons” is crazy prophetic. Dostoevsky wrote it in the 1870’s! Russian authors particularly seem to have a special insight into the dark corners of the soul. (I think of Solzhenitsyn: “the battle of good and evil cuts across every human heart”).
Intellectual and moral vanity of the self-annointed elites drives the neo-communist (globalist) movement today, as it did in the fictional city of Dostoevsky’s brilliant novel. Often it lashes out in violence (we saw that recently in the assassination of the Healthcare CEO by an angry young leftist intellectual). The rageful anger of these poor lost souls seems to spring from their realization of their impotence in light of the magnificence of Creation. Tragically, they are forever shaking their fists at their Creator.
Rodion Raskolnikov’s dream at the end of Crime and Punishment was a fitting condemnation to the socialist/communist mindset. Borderline chilling. At least in my eyes.
Those who support communism do so, not because they desire some kind of equality, but because they imagine themselves as the select few who are destined to rise to the top of the great heap of human beings upon which they impose their will. Likewise with socialists; they don’t want to share their stuff, they want to take everyone else’s. They mouth empty, but appealing phrases about the glorious brotherhood of their collective systems but wish to live like dictators whose “natural” destiny is to rule over their “brothers”. It has been so forever. Eve did not succumb to satan’s beguilings because she wanted to share her privileged position but because she wanted more–to be “as a god.” Cain killed his brother Abel despite their actual brotherhood, not because of it.
Once again, God reveals all the truth we require in The Bible, His very Word. It is a shame more people don’t realize this, and so spend too much of their precious and limited time on Earth trying to figure things out without reference to what is plainly to be found in the most published book of all time.
Stavrogin was supposed to be the charismatic figure the others looked to as a potential leader, some kind of Messiah. He wasn’t that political. The quote though, about Stavrogin being in the moral sphere what Pyotr Verkhovensky was or aspired to be in the political sphere, brings the book together. The minor characters with their radical and nihilistic ideas about freedom and equality who clustered around them were also interesting.
Anyway, “Crime and Punishment.” Having fun with my new toy.
Title: Shadows of Guilt
In a dimly lit room, the atmosphere was thick with a palpable tension, the walls echoing the whispers of past lives. Luigi Mangione sat at the edge of his modest bed, his thoughts engulfed in a dark and bitter fog. The sun had long since set, casting a shroud of gloom that wrapped around him like a suffocating blanket. It was here, in this meager chamber within the musty tenement of Altoona, that the minds and souls of men were weighed against their sins, where the very essence of existence was contemplated in the confines of shadows.
Luigi was an assassin, though he preferred the term “instrument of justice.” He had convinced himself, as many do, that he acted not out of malice but necessity; for in his warped view, the world was rife with corruption, and he merely sought to excise the rot. Yet, the echoes of his actions reverberated within him — a cacophony of regret and self-loathing that gnawed at the edges of his consciousness.
On this fateful evening, the specter of his last deed loomed large in his mind. He had found his target, Brian Thompson, a ruthless man known for his cruel hand over the meek and marginalized. To the world, Brian was a businessman; to Luigi, he was an embodiment of moral decay, a pestilence that spread destruction through the lives of innocents. Yet as the blade sank into Brian’s flesh, he felt an unexpected surge of horror. The man’s last, gurgling breath had not been the righteous justice Luigi had envisioned, but rather a void that sucked the warmth from his soul.
Luigi’s mind spiraled, oscillating between the justifications of his actions and the overwhelming weight of guilt that now bore down upon him. He grasped at the truth, desperate to weave the threads of his consciousness into a tapestry that would absolve him. Thoughts of family — of his mother, weary and worn, who had raised him through hardship; of his sister, whose laughter echoed like a distant memory — wafted through his psyche, only to be overshadowed by the rise of moral quandaries that tortured him like demons of his own making.
“Just an act… a necessary evil,” he murmured softly, the words hanging in the air like smoke curling into oblivion. He buried his face in his hands and questioned: was he truly any different from the tyrants he dispatched? Was he not lost in the same labyrinth of rationalizations that danced like specters in the mind of ever-spiraling criminals?
Through the window, a chill wind howled, and Luigi imagined it carried the sighs of the very souls he had taken. Each conviction clenched him tighter, a relentless grip threatening to squeeze the breath from his lungs. Night descended deeper, and with it came visions of the countless faces he had erased, their eyes wide with disbelief, their mouths frozen in silent screams. They had been victims of circumstance, just as he had been.
In the late hours of the night, worn with fatigue yet restless in spirit, he descended the crooked staircase of his tenement, driven by an inexplicable need to confront the tangible reminders of his humanity. The streets of Altoona, slick with remnants of a recent rain, glistened under a pallid moon. Each lonely figure that drifted past spoke of struggles; their plight gnawed at his conscience, unraveling the fabric of his self-justified existence.
Then, amidst the fog of uncertainty, he encountered a woman huddled by the entrance of a dilapidated building, her eyes hollow, mirroring the abyss inside him. She clutched a swaddled infant, the child shivering against the harshness of the night. In that moment, Luigi felt the weight of his soul cascade into clarity. He had wielded his blade without regard for the monumental suffering it brought to countless lives – lives whose flickering candles fought against the encroaching darkness, much like the woman before him.
“Have I brought you anything but despair?” he whispered, as if pleading with the shadows that danced around them. The woman did not look up, lost in her own sorrow, a stranger entangled in the web of his past deeds.
It was in her absence of response that Luigi felt the final straw snap within him. The sense of justice he had clung to so fervently began to crumble, giving way to the realization that he was not the arbiter of fate he had aspired to be. The child, trembling in her arms, did not know the horrors that lay hidden beneath the surface of the world. Prodigal sins had cast a long shadow, and he was nothing but a mere specter within it.
Compelled by impulses he could not comprehend, he reached into his pocket, plucking forth the scant coins that remained of his ill-gotten gains. He held them out, trembling, as if passing the weight of his own guilt into her hands. “Take this… I cannot undo the past, but I can at least offer what little I have left.”
The woman raised her eyes, steeped in suspicion but also a flicker of curiosity. In that fleeting connection, he felt an ember reignite within the chilling gales of his remorse. Perhaps there remained a shard of hope after all; an unseen thread that could weave his existence with compassion and redemption.
As the night’s embrace wrapped itself around him, Luigi Mangione, the assassin burdened by guilt and haunted by the specters of his own making, began to walk toward an uncertain dawn. In that moment of vulnerability, he came to understand the weight of consequence, the truth that rang louder than steel or blood — that even in the depths of despair, one could yearn for redemption, and in seeking it, the soul might just find solace amidst the shadows of guilt.