Demons

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

May.”

May 1 birthday of the i!luminati

“And I consider that our centres abroad have forgotten what Russia is like and have lost all touch, and that's why they talk such nonsense. . . . I even think that instead of many hundreds of quintets in Russia, we are the only one that exists, and there is no network at all,” Liputin gasped finally.

This is the truth

I should have a reptile like you beside me.”

The shock had been given;

Shock

“You gave me a sign just now when you took my hand. But you know I can treat all these signals with contempt! I don't acknowledge them. . . . I don't want them. .. . I can throw you downstairs this minute, do you know that?”

again he was haunted by hopes.

“Well, you will. Be careful, Kirillov. I've heard that's just how fits begin. An epileptic described exactly that sensation before a fit, word for word as you've done. He mentioned five seconds, too, and said that more could not be endured. Remember Mahomet's pitcher from which no drop of water was spilt while he circled Paradise on his horse. That was a case of five seconds too; that's too much like your eternal harmony, and Mahomet was an epileptic. Be careful, Kirillov, it's. epilepsy!”

“Ech, what nonsense he talks! It's simply a further development of the organism, and there's nothing else in it, no mystery,” said Arina Prohorovna with genuine and good-humoured laughter. “If you talk like that, every fly is a mystery. But I tell you what: superfluous people ought not to be born. We must first remould everything so that they won't be superfluous and then bring them into

the world. As it is, we shall have to take him to the Foundling, the day after to-morrow . . . . Though that's as it should be.”

from sentimentalism.

“If God exists, all is His will and from His will I cannot escape. If not, it's all my will and I am bound to show self-will.”

It's like a beggar inheriting a fortune and being afraid of it and not daring to approach the bag

I am killing myself to prove my independence and my new terrible freedom.”

“Stay! I want to put at the top a face with the tongue out.”

they will be by to-morrow, for they'll be in an awful funk, and that will make them as soft as wax . .

*February 19, 1861, the day of the Emancipation of the Serfs, is meant.— Translator's note.

almost a question of struggling for existence.”

It was by no means so nice “here” however. He did not care to hear of her difficulties; his head was full of fancies and nothing else. He looked upon his illness as something transitory, a trifling ailment, and did not think about it at all; he though of nothing but how they would go and sell “these books.” He asked her to read him the gospel.

Don Quoixte

Sofya Matveyevna knew the gospel well and at once found the passage in St. Luke which I have chosen as the motto of my record. I quote it here again: “'And there was there one herd of many swine feeding on the mountain; and they besought him that he would suffer them to enter into them. And he suffered them.

Then went the devils out of the man and entered into the swine; and the herd ran violently down a steep place into the lake, and were choked. “'When they that fed them saw what was done, they fled, and went and told it in the city and in the country.

You see, that's exactly like our Russia, those devils that come out of the sick man and enter into the swine. They are all the sores, all the foul contagions, all the impurities,

all the devils great and small that have multiplied in that great invalid, our beloved Russia, in the course of ages and ages. Oui, cette Russie que j'aimais tou jours. But a great idea and a great Will will encompass it from on high, as with that lunatic possessed of devils . . . and all those devils will come forth, all the impurity, all the rottenness that was putrefying on the surface . . . and they will beg of themselves to enter into swine; and indeed maybe they have entered into them already! They are we, we and those . . . and Petrusha and les autres avec lui . . . and I perhaps at the head of them, and we shall cast ourselves down, possessed and raving, from the rocks into the sea, and we shall all be drowned — and a good thing too, for that is all we are fit for. But the sick man will be healed and 'will sit at the

pounced on her like a hawk on a chicken, seized her by the hand

thanks to Lyamshin.

Liputin had disappeared the same day before twelve o'clock.

the secret society, the organisation, and the network

When asked what was the object of so many murders and scandals and dastardly outrages,

“it was with the idea of systematically undermining the foundations, systematically destroying society and all principles; with the idea of nonplussing every one and making hay of everything, and then, when society was tottering, sick and out of joint, cynical and sceptical though filled with an intense eagerness for self-preservation and for some guiding idea...

network of quintets, which were actively, meanwhile, gathering recruits and seeking out the weak sp...

systematic disorder,

that all Russia was overspread with a network,