Demons

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

He was one of those idealistic Russian beings who are suddenly struck by some powerful idea and immediately, then and there, seem to be crushed by it, even sometimes permanently. They are never equipped to deal with it, and instead come to believe in it passionately, and so their entire life from then on passes in its final throes, as it were, under the stone that has fallen upon them and already crushed them half to death.

Without heads on our shoulders there is no way we can organize anything, despite the fact that it is our heads that are the greatest impediment to our understanding of things.’

But at this point Shatov stepped in. ‘These men of yours never did love the people, didn’t suffer for them and sacrificed nothing for them, no matter how they themselves may have imagined they did to make themselves feel good!’ he growled sullenly, staring at the floor and shifting impatiently in his chair. ‘Are you saying that they didn’t love the people?’ Stepan Trofimovich began to shriek. ‘Oh, how they loved Russia!’ ‘Neither Russia nor the people!’ Shatov also began to shriek, his eyes flashing. ‘It’s impossible to love what you don’t know, and they had no understanding of the Russian people!

And anyone who has no people has no God either! You can be quite sure that all who cease to understand their own people and lose their ties with them, immediately and to the same extent, also lose the faith of their fathers, and either become atheists or indifferent.

‘What is it that in your opinion deters people from suicide?’ I asked. He looked at me distractedly, as if suddenly remembering what we’d been talking about. ‘I… I still don’t know much… two prejudices deter them, two things; only two; one is very small, the other is very big. But even the small one is also very big.’ ‘Well, what’s the small one, then?’ ‘Pain.’ ‘Pain? Is it really so important… in this case?’ ‘It’s the very first thing. There are two kinds of people: those who kill themselves either from some great sorrow, or from anger, or the crazy ones — it amounts to the same thing… they do it suddenly. They don’t think about pain very much, but do it suddenly. But those who do it for good reason — they think a lot.’ ‘Why, are there people who do it for good reason?’ ‘A great many. If there were no prejudice, there’d be more of them; a great many; everyone.’

‘Perhaps you’re judging by yourself?’ ‘Everyone can’t help but judge by himself,’ he said, flushing. ‘Full freedom will come only when it makes no difference whether to live or not to live. That’s the goal for everyone.’

‘Life is pain, life is fear and man is unhappy. Now all is pain and fear. Now man loves life because he loves pain and fear. And that’s how he’s been made. Now life is given in exchange for pain and fear, and that’s the basis of the whole deception. Now man is still not what he should be. There will be a new man, happy and proud. Whoever doesn’t care whether he lives or doesn’t live, he will be the new man. Whoever conquers pain and fear, he himself will be God. And that other God will no longer be.’

According to Aleksey, he wants to take his own life not because he is unhappy but because he wants to prove humans’ capacity for radical freedom. To prove that, Aleksey believes he must overcome humans’ fear of death

‘He doesn’t exist, but he does exist. In the stone there’s no pain, but in the fear of the stone there is pain. God is the pain of the fear of death. Whoever conquers pain and fear will himself become God. Then a new life, then a new man, everything new… Then history will be divided into two parts: from the gorilla to the annihilation of God, and from the annihilation of God to…’ ‘To the gorilla?’ ‘… to the change of the earth and of man, physically.

Everyone who wants the main freedom must dare to kill himself. Whoever dares to kill himself has learned the secret of deception. There’s no freedom beyond that; that’s all there is, and there’s nothing beyond it. Whoever dares to kill himself is God.

At that moment he felt another sorrow as well, namely, the sting of his own awareness for having acted like a scoundrel; he later admitted this to me in all frankness. Yet the genuine, unambiguous sorrow of even a phenomenally frivolous man is sometimes capable of making him solid and steadfast, albeit for a short time. Moreover, sincere, genuine sorrow has sometimes even made fools wise, also, of course, for a time; such is precisely the nature of sorrow.

‘Of course, I understand shooting yourself,’ Nikolay Vsevolodovich began again, frowning somewhat, after a long, reflective three-minute silence. ‘I’ve sometimes imagined doing it myself, and then some new thought always comes to me: if one were to commit an evil deed or, more important, a shameful act, that is, something disgraceful, but very base indeed and… absurd, so that people would remember it for a thousand years and hold it in contempt for a thousand years, and suddenly comes the thought: “A single blow in the temple, and after that, nothing”. Then what would I care about people and the fact that they’d hold me in contempt for a thousand years, isn’t that so?’ ‘You’re calling that a new thought?’ Kirillov said after some reflection. ‘I’m… not calling it… once when I thought about it, I felt it a completely new thought.’ ‘You “felt a thought”?’ Kirillov repeated. ‘That’s good. There are many thoughts which have always existed, and which suddenly become new. That’s true. I now see a great deal as if for the first time.’

The goal of all movements of peoples, in every people and in every period of its existence, is nothing but a search for God, its own God, unquestionably its own, and faith in him as the only true one. God is the synthesis of the personality of an entire people, taken from its beginning to its end. It has never been the case that all or many peoples have had a single common God, but each has certainly had its own special one. It is a sign of a people’s extinction when gods begin to be held in common. When the gods come to be held in common, then the gods die and so does faith in them, along with the peoples themselves. The stronger a people, the more singular its God. There has never yet been a people without religion, that is, without the concept of evil and good. Each people has its own concept of evil and good, and its own evil and good. When many different peoples begin to hold concepts of evil and good in common, then the peoples die out, and then the very difference between evil and good begins to blur and disappear. Reason has never had the power of defining evil and good or separating evil from good, even approximately. On the contrary, it has always mixed them up in a shameful and pitiful fashion, whereas science has found solutions by sheer force. In particular, this is the distinguishing feature of half-science, mankind’s most dreadful scourge, worse than plague, famine and war, and it has been unknown until the present century. Half-science is a despot such as h...

Every one of these five operatives formed the first group in the fervent belief that it was merely a unit that linked hundreds and thousands of similar groups of five, just like theirs, scattered throughout Russia, and that everything depended on some huge but secret central organization that, in turn, was organically linked with the universal European revolution. But to my regret, I must admit that even at that time there were signs of discord among them.

Even though he was smiling ironically, he was severely shaken. The expression on his face plainly said: ‘I’m really not the person you think, I’m really on your side; just praise me, praise me more, as much as possible, I like that very much.’

This strong and rough man, whose feathers were constantly being ruffled, had suddenly softened and brightened. Something unusual and entirely unexpected had begun to stir in his soul. Three years of separation, three years of a broken marriage had dislodged nothing from his heart. And perhaps every day of those three years he had dreamed of her, of the beloved being who had once said ‘I love you’ to him. Knowing Shatov, I can say for certain that he would never have allowed himself even to dream that any woman could say ‘I love you’ to him. He was fiercely chaste and modest, regarded himself as a dreadful freak, hated his own face and character, compared himself to some monster who was fit only to be taken around and exhibited at fairs. As a consequence of all this, he valued honesty above all things and dedicated himself to his convictions to the point of fanaticism; he was sullen, proud, quick to anger and sparing with words. But now this single being who had loved him for two weeks (he had always, always believed that!), this being whom he had always regarded as immeasurably superior to himself despite his utterly sober understanding of her faults; this being whom he could forgive everything, everything (of which there could be absolutely no question, for just the opposite was actually true, so that in his eyes he himself was guilty of everything before her), this woman, this Marya Shatova, was suddenly again in his house, before him again… this was almost impossible to...

‘God is necessary to me because he is the only being who is capable of eternal love…’

‘My immortality is necessary if only because God would not want to commit an injustice and utterly quench the flame of love for him once it has been kindled in my heart. And what is more precious than love? Love is higher than existence, love is the crown of being, and how is it possible that existence is not subordinate to it? If I have come to love him and have taken joy in my love, is it possible that he should extinguish both me and my joy and turn us into nothing? If God exists, then I am immortal too! Voilà ma profession de foi!’49

Stepan declares that God is necessary because God is the only being capable of eternal love. He says that all of human existence rests on the fact that people can bow before something unfathomably great. Without that, people would die of despair.