How Devils drew on The Gospels
A documented line of influence: Fyodor Dostoevsky demonstrably engaged Matthew’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Gospels
Matthew · c. 85
BibleThe influenced
Devils
Fyodor Dostoevsky · 1872
The Age of the NovelRelevance
9/10
On Devils’s page
- The novel's second epigraph is the Gadarene swine from Luke 8 — the source of the title and the entire metaphor
- Dostoevsky told Maykov he meant the nihilists as the demons leaving a sick Russia for a herd that will plunge to its death
- Know the Gospel scene and the book's diagnosis of a possessed nation snaps into focus
On The Gospels’s page
- Luke's Gadarene swine — the demons cast out of a man into a herd that drowns itself — gave Dostoevsky his title, his epigraph, and his governing image
- In a letter to Maykov he says it plainly: "the devils went out of the Russian man and entered into a herd of swine"
- Devils reads the whole nihilist convulsion of 1860s Russia through that single Gospel scene