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.