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.
