Demons

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

1. The revolutionist is a dedicated man. He has no interests of his own, no affairs, no ties, no possessions, not even a name. Everything in him is swallowed up in a single exclusive interest, a single idea, a single passion — revolution.

3. The revolutionist scorns all ideology and rejects worldly science, relegating it to future generations. He knows only one science — the science of destruction. For that and that alone he studies mechanics, physics, chemistry and, if you please, medicine. For that he studies living science day and night — people, character, positions, and all the conditions of the current social structure in all possible classes. For the goal is one — the swiftest and surest destruction of this vile structure.

Crime and Punishment treats radicalism as a disease, while Demons treats it as madness or possession by evil spirits, but the conscious trichinae in this dream show Dostoyevsky well on the way towards Demons before he had finished Crime and Punishment.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Psychological Novel links Pyotr Stepanovich’s outrageousness and Stavrogin’s mental and marital states not to Society, but to the ways they dominate Shatov’s and Kirillov’s wildly different modes of thought; Lizaveta Nikolayevna’s, Darya Pavlovna’s and Marya Ignatyevna’s wildly different kinds of desire; Varvara Petrovna’s and Stepan Trofimovich’s social existence; and each other’s dreams of an anti-utopia, which somehow become contagious enough to infect the youth of the town and many of their servile elders. The Psychological Novel turns into an exploration of domination and helplessness, with Varvara Petrovna exploiting aristocratic power, Governor von Lembke and those around him bureaucratic power, and the holy fool Semyon Yakovlevich, no longer a parenthetical figure, the power of religious fanaticism, pure of birth or rank or intellect.

he refused to publish the chapter in which Stavrogin confesses to the rape of a child who then commits suicide. This monstrous passage is the culmination of the Psychological Novel Dostoyevsky had in mind, because it absorbs all three kinds of novel into a study of unbridled power. Stavrogin’s social, ideological and sexual power becomes nothing but power in the encounter with the child.

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.

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

It is often said that there are two kinds of novel, those that tell the reader what is happening, and those that show the reader what is happening. 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. Demons not only tells us about scandals and catastrophes, and shows them to us; it uses its whole structure to carry us through irony, then anger, then into the experience of being manipulated towards madness.

In the twenty-first century, journalists and other writers have been fascinated by the motives, the backgrounds and the psyches of those who killed themselves on suicide missions, just as they were with the kamikazes in the twentieth century, but they have devoted surprisingly little study to the trainers and motivators who recruit them and send them on their missions. Pyotr Stepanovich and Stavrogin offer rich bodies of understanding for such figures. Like Nechayev, 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. It is a scary book.

he was inordinately fond of his position as a man who was ‘persecuted’ and, so to speak, ‘exiled’.1 Both these little words have a kind of classical lustre to them, which had proved enduringly seductive to him, and, with the passage of so many years, had gradually raised him in his own opinion of himself and finally placed him on a pedestal that was very lofty and gratifying to his self-esteem.

There are strange friendships: two friends almost want to devour each other, and they spend their entire lives living that way, but meanwhile they cannot part.

Oh, my friends!’ he would sometimes exclaim to us in an inspired tone, ‘you cannot imagine what sadness and anger take hold of your entire soul when a great idea that you have long held in sacred esteem is picked up by clods and dragged out into the street for idiots like themselves, and you suddenly come across it in a flea market, unrecognizable, covered with dirt, absurdly presented all askew, without proportion, without harmony, a plaything for stupid children!

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.’

Everything in this country comes from idleness, both the good and the bad. Everything comes from the nice, cultivated, whimsical idleness of our gentlemen!

Don’t they really understand that to acquire an opinion the very first thing needed is labour, one’s own labour, one’s own initiative in matters, one’s own practical experience! Nothing will ever be gained for nothing. If we labour, we shall have our own opinion as well. But since we never shall labour, then opinion will also be expressed for us only by those who until now have done the work instead of us, in other words, that same old Europe, those same old Germans — our teachers for the last two hundred years.

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 can be more stupid than a stupid, kind person?’ ‘An evil fool, ma bonne amie,17 an evil fool is even more stupid,’

it’s all the result of that same immaturity, that same sentimentalism! They are captivated not by realism, but by the sentimental, idealistic side of socialism, so to speak, its religious tinge, its poetry… secondhand, naturally.

all our talented gentlemen of the middling sort, who are usually regarded as nothing short of geniuses during their lifetime, not only disappear from people’s memory when they die, rather suddenly somehow and virtually without a trace, but it also happens that even during their lifetime, as soon as a new generation comes of age and takes the place of the one in which they have been active, they are mysteriously forgotten and neglected by all.

Not infrequently it turns out that a writer whom people have long credited with an extraordinary depth of ideas and whom they have expected to exert an extraordinary and major influence on the direction of society, displays in the end such a watered-down and minuscule version of his basic little idea that no one is even sorry that he’s succeeded in writing himself out.

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.’

‘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.’

‘So, that other God does exist, in your opinion?’ ‘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.

‘There have been millions of suicides.’ ‘But never for that reason, always with fear and not for that purpose. Not to kill fear. Whoever kills himself only for the purpose of killing fear will immediately become God.’

‘There’s also hatred here,’ he stated, after a minute of silence, ‘they’d be the first to be dreadfully unhappy if Russia should somehow rebuild itself, even the way they want it, and should somehow become boundlessly rich and happy. Then there would be no one for them to hate, no one to spit on, nothing to make fun of! What we have here is nothing but a boundless animal hatred for Russia which has eaten into their organism…

‘This tiny little word “why” has been spread throughout the entire universe from the very first day of creation, madam, and all of nature at every moment cries out to its creator: “Why?” And for seven thousand years now it has received no answer. Is it really up to Captain Lebyadkin alone to provide an answer, and is that fair, madam?’

He spoke quickly, hurriedly, but at the same time in a self-assured manner, and was never at a loss for words. Despite his hurried air, his thoughts were unruffled, precise and final — and that stood out in particular. He articulated his words in a surprisingly clear manner; his words fell from his lips like large, perfectly formed grains, always well chosen and always ready to be of service. At first you would find this very much to your liking, but then it would become repellent, precisely because of this excessively clear articulation, and this string of ever-ready words. You somehow began to imagine that his tongue must be of some special shape, unusually long and thin somehow, terribly red and extraordinarily sharp, its tip in constant and spontaneous movement.

It’s like religion: the worse a man’s life is, or the more cowed or poorer an entire people is, then the more stubbornly they dream of a reward in paradise, and if a hundred thousand priests keep harping on it, fanning the flames of their dream and seeking to profit by it, then…

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.

There was more rage in Nikolay Vsevolodovich, perhaps, than in those other two put together, but it was a cold, calm and, if one can put it this way, rational rage, and therefore, the most repellent and most dreadful kind there can be.

The very best thing would be to play no role at all, just to show one’s own self, isn’t that so? There’s nothing more devious than one’s own self, because no one will believe it.

‘So you love life, too?’ ‘Yes, I love life, too. What of it?’ ‘If you should decide to shoot yourself.’ ‘What do you mean? Why put them together? Life is one thing, and that’s another. Life exists, but death doesn’t exist at all.’ ‘You’ve begun to believe in a future eternal life?’ ‘No, not in a future eternal life, but in eternal life right here. There are moments, you reach moments, and time suddenly stops and it will become eternal.’ ‘You hope to reach such a moment?’ ‘Yes.’

I couldn’t immediately tear myself away from everything to which I had become attached since childhood — it would have been too bloody — and on which I had lavished all the ecstasies of my hopes and all the tears of my hatred… It’s hard to change gods.

‘Not a single people,’ he began, as if reading line for line and at the same time continuing to look threateningly at Stavrogin, ‘not one people has ever yet organized itself according to the principles of science and reason. Never has there been a single example of that, except only for a brief moment, out of stupidity. Socialism, by its very nature, must be atheism, for it has specifically proclaimed, from its very first words, that it is an atheistic construct and is intentionally organized exclusively according to the principles of science and reason. Reason and science in the life of peoples always, now and from the beginning of time, have fulfilled merely a secondary and auxiliary function; and that will be their function until the end of time. Peoples are formed and moved by another force that rules and dominates them, but whose origin is unknown and inexplicable. This force is the force of an unquenchable desire to go on to the end, while at the same time denying the end. This is the force of a ceaseless and tireless affirmation of its own being and the denial of death. It is the spirit of life, as the Scriptures say, “of living water”, the drying up of which is threatened in the Apocalypse.25 It is the aesthetic principle, as the philosophers say, the moral principle, as they also identify it. “The search for God”, as I call it more simply. The goal of all movements of peoples, in every people and in every period of its existence, is nothing but a search for God, ...

‘I reduce God to an attribute of nationality?’ Shatov shouted. ‘On the contrary, I raise the people up to God. Why, has it ever been otherwise? The people are the body of God. Every people is a people only as long as it has its special God and excludes all the other gods in the world without any compromise, as long as it has faith that it will triumph through its own God and will drive all the other gods from the world. That is what everyone has believed from the beginning of time, all the great peoples, at least all those who were in any way singled out, all who stood at the head of humanity. You can’t go against facts. The Hebrews lived only in anticipation of the coming of the true God, and they left the true God to the world. The Greeks attempted to deify nature and bequeath their religion to the world, that is, philosophy and art. Rome did deify the people in the form of the state, and bequeathed the state to other peoples. France, in the course of its long history, was merely the incarnation and development of the idea of the Roman god, and if they ended by casting their Roman god into the abyss and going all out for atheism, which they call socialism for the time being, then that’s only because atheism is, after all, healthier than Roman Catholicism. If a great people does not have faith that it alone embodies the truth (in itself alone, and in it exclusively), if it does not have faith that it alone has the ability and is called to resurrect all peoples and save th...

‘I also don’t know why evil is nasty and good is beautiful, but I do know why the sense of this distinction is erased and lost in gentlemen like the Stavrogins,’

Evidently it’s true that the entire second half of a man’s life is usually composed solely of the habits accumulated during the first half.’

I took a look at all of you then: all of you were angry, all of you’d been quarrelling with one other; you don’t know how to get together and have a good laugh. So much wealth and so little joy — I find that all disgusting.

one does after all have to know where one is living and with whom one is dealing. It’s really impossible to live one’s entire life on the heights of one’s own fantasy.

You see, my very dear Pyotr Stepanovich, you call us government officials. That is so. Independent officials? That is so. But excuse me, how are we acting? The responsibility is ours, and as a result we are serving the common cause, just as you are. We are merely keeping a firm hand on what you are trying to topple, and what without us would fall completely apart. We are not your enemies, by no means: we say to you: move ahead, make progrèss, even topple things, that is, everything that’s old and subject to refashioning; but when necessary we shall also keep you within the necessary limits and thereby save you from yourselves, because without us, you would simply shake Russia to her foundations and deprive her of all outward decency, while our task is to concern ourselves with outward decency. Dig a little deeper and you will see that we and you are mutually necessary to one another.

You see, all these institutions — whether the zemstvos or the courts of law — should live a double life, so to speak, that is, it’s necessary for them to exist (I agree that this is essential), but, well, on the other hand, they ought not to exist. All according to the views of the government. But if the prevailing mood is that the institutions suddenly turn out to be essential, then I immediately have them at hand. If the need for them should pass, no one would be able to find them in my province.

Generally speaking, in every misfortune that befalls one’s neighbour there is something that gladdens the eye of the onlooker, it doesn’t make any difference who you may be.

the gratification derived from giving charity is an arrogant and immoral gratification, the gratification a rich man takes in his riches, his power, and the comparison he makes between his importance and the importance of a poor man. Charity corrupts both the one who gives it and the one who receives it, and furthermore, it doesn’t achieve its goal, because it only intensifies poverty. Lazy people who don’t want to work throng around people who give, like gamblers around the gambling table, hoping to win. And meanwhile, the pitiful coins that are tossed their way are insufficient for even a hundredth of what they need.

If Babylon really does collapse18 there, and its fall is great (in which I fully agree with you, although I think that it will last my lifetime), then here in Russia there is nothing to collapse, comparatively speaking. What will fall here is not stones; rather, everything will dissolve into mud. The last thing in the world that Holy Rus is capable of doing is offering resistance to anything. The simple people are still somehow sustained by the Russian God; but the Russian God, according to the latest information, is extremely unreliable and scarcely even held out against the peasant reform, or at least he was severely shaken.