Demons

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

a farm serf comforted him as a small boy with a panic attack,

When he hallucinated a wolf chasing him :)

fell under the spell of the liberal, Europeanized gentleman and writer Ivan Turgenev,

Lmaooo dussy is surprisingly similar to me

they would discuss phalansteries,

I haven't seen the word 'phalanstery' since NFU and I feel like a phantom came over me.

Sergey Nechayev, claimed a large network of five-man cells linked to foreign leaders, and was famous for his ‘Catechism of a Revolutionary’,

Here's Pyotr Stepanych!!!

He knows only one science — the science of destruction.

Point & laugh (to be srs though, chaos is a central theme in Demons).

He must regard them as part of the common revolutionary capital

That's why Petya compared his revolutionaries to pigs (foggy memory)

the revolutionist can and often must live within society, pretending to be not at all what he is.

Demons. Literally the two main demons here are almost 'omnipresent' in society.

during the trial of a group of young men who had murdered the student Ivanov in a garden grotto

Here's Ivan Shatov

Dostoyevsky’s character types are almost always composites.

Hit the nail on that one

they all entered into the making of Pyotr, and, less directly, of Stavrogin.

That is, all the anarchists and populists Dostoyevsky knew from the inside.

‘The Legend of a Great Sinner’.

STOP I WRITHE IN COLD SWEAT EVERY TIME I REMEMBER HE NEVER GOT TO WRITE THIS

Five pages from the end of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov has the last of his extraordinary dreams:

I FUCKING KNEWWWW THAT PART WAS SOMEHOW RLATED TO DEMONS. I was so spooked by the resemblance when I read it actually wrote 'Demons?' on my book.

Humans who had ingested them immediately became possessed and mad. But never, never, had humans considered themselves so shrewd and unshakeable in their truth as the infected did.

This was what got my mouth gaping. The chaos and imagery is so essentially Demons.

Demons also mixes three sub-genres of novel, but these are divided along a different axis: the Society Tale, primarily in Part I; the Anti-Nihilist Novel in Part II; and the Psychological Novel in Part III.

Smth good for me to remember

the interplay between power and manners, emotion and manipulation in a world whose hierarchical social structure is as important as any character.

These societal features are almost characters of Dostoyevsky's novels.

In Part I, the central concerns are underlined by the frequent refusal of the characters even to discuss them:

Good for me to remember

The Anti-Nihilist Novel is a darker genre, making vice ugly and sometimes fearsome.

Nice

It has its origin not so much in fiction as in the nasty diatribes and exposes of the 1860s.

Not of literature but of the world

Kirillov, Shigalyov and Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky give monologues in Part II that enunciate and embody different implications of Nechayevism: Kirillov links it to self-destruction; Shigalyov to enslavement; Pyotr Stepanovich to madness; but all three to domination by the will.

Woah

Pyotr Stepanovich moves, as Nechayev had said a revolutionist should, between this world and that of the Society Tale.

YES

Some characters are split almost evenly between the two.

Good for me to remember

In this part of Demons, Dostoyevsky addresses a question he had raised at certain points in Notes from Underground.

Oh gosh

‘What sort of human psyche would behave this way?’ The Underground Man in Notes from Underground was his devastating answer, a man so worried about his insignificance that he prepared epically for a pavement collision with a man who ignored him, and sought reassurance that he existed in the attention that he could get only by insulting people, including his readers.

Lmao i had a similar interpretation of the Underground Man

Chernyshevsky had disinvented the existing Psychological Novel, and Dostoyevsky reinvented it to ridicule him.

WILD HAHAHAA

Dostoyevsky again wondered about the kind of psyche that would need this anti-social violence. The answer this time took the form of a huge novel, with two instantiations of Nechayev — Stavrogin and Pyotr Stepanovich.

Shet. Good to remember though

Dostoyevsky would characterize the unbelieving as ‘such lightweights that they have no scholarly preparation for knowing what it is that they are denying…

He's so fr for that

he was on what a later generation would call an ego trip.

Real (that is that, Petya was on an ego trip)

Stavrogin lives centrally in the Society Tale plot and secondarily in the Anti-Nihilist plot, while Pyotr Stepanovich lives primarily in the Anti-Nihilist plot and secondarily in the Society Tale.

Remember <3

The Psychological Novel turns into an exploration of domination and helplessness,

Stavrogin’s child rape explains the motivation for Pyotr Stepanovich’s drive to dominance: unbridled power is not the means to utopia or sex; it is the source of a sick gratification that comes from trampling on helplessness.

WOAH Remember

Dostoyevsky pairs his sensually enormous, self-destructively murderous villains with lightweight political villains.

Real (the roast on Petya, Luzhin, and Rakitin is hilarious)

If Demons

Highlighting these two words for me to refer to the introduction of the narrators who have confused me since my first read.

Anton Lavrentyevich often calls himself a chronicler, and at the beginning of the novel is almost always that.

Narrator in Part I

Lembke’s wife aspires to popularity among the Radical youth and becomes subject to the will of Karmazinov and Pyotr.

Remember <3

Stepan’s intellectual and biological offspring, Stavrogin and Pyotr Stepanovich, move in from the geographical and narrative fringes, the narrator develops strong opinions.

Narrator in Part II

His narrative voice here exchanges its validating participation for a transparency that makes the readers themselves participate.

Narrator in Part III

From its title to its final sentence, this novel deals with insanity.

Real and also; Tchaikovsky on Dostoyevsky: 'All characters are insane without exemption.'

Both epigraphs identify the demons of the title as earlier words for and understandings of madness.

Remember

In the nineteenth century, Dostoyevsky and other Russians were inventing a third kind of novel, one that also made the reader experience what is happening.

REALEST

The second epigraph connects madness with both self-destruction and a return to sanity,

That's related to the weirdest final chapters of Demons, where the demons die or flee

Stavrogin, who has been scientifically diagnosed as delirious after biting the governor’s ear, is called completely sane at the time of his suicide,

Woah

Stepan Trofimovich, his foolish mentor, seeks salvation, while all the conspirators are destroyed,

Pyotr Stepanovich who, like Nechayev, fl...

Kirillov, Lizaveta Nikolayevna and Stavrogin may be the most appealing of the major figures in the novel, and they all destroy themselves.

Yea…

‘Dostoyevsky said… ’ and end it with a quotation from any of his characters, including the narrator, since the meaning of a Dostoyevskian text resides in the dialogue among the ideas, and the authorial spokesman was an anachronism for him.

REALLLLL

The Ridiculous Man believes that life is more important than the meaning of life.

This rang strongly in TBK and even impressed me as such when I read Dream of a Ridiculous Man.

Kirillov and Shigalyov have complementary theories opposed to this doctrine, one a theory that outweighs his own life, and the other a theory worth a hundred million other lives.

Remember

Psychological Novel perhaps belongs best to the twentieth century, when a few Stavrogins empowered thousands of Pyotr Stepanovichs to drive herds of ‘capital’, to use Nechayev’s term, to slaughter about a hundred million people, the very number Shigalyov and Pyotr hit upon.

This is what made Demons so prophetic. It's just wild how accurate it became.

Stavrogin uses ideological virtuosity and Pyotr Stepanovich conspiratorial authority to empower their will to send others to destruction for the sake of purposeless power, to shock and awe.

Remember

PART I

'Tis my second read of this novel and I remember certain events but not clearly :>