Devils
Devils
Read this if you…
- want Dostoevsky attacking societal nihilism (a lot of critiques/themes hold up today)
- want dostoevsky using fiction to essentially predict future revolutionary characteristics
- want to explore elites growing hollow, causing the younger generation to lose faith in the system
Skip this if you…
- don't want to like Dostoevsky like everyone else
- don't want his hardest book to follow (this may take some looking up summaries and stuff to keep it straight)
- don't want Dostoevsky talking politics/society that's endlessly relevant, including today
The 
Take
Another banger but this one takes a long time to get going. It’s mostly a philosophical exploration of a great spiritual emptiness in society caused by an older generation’s metastasis of traditional values into vanity, causing the younger generation to grow up with almost no faith in traditional beliefs at all, easily infected by evil and madness. Low brow just a fun dark shit show of a plot, like all Dostoevsky.
The lineage through Devils
- The Gospels by Matthew. Devils built on it. - 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
- Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol. Devils built on it. - *Devils* is written in an openly Gogolian key, and *Dead Souls* is where that key was cut — the gossiping local chronicler, the grotesque provincial comedy - Dostoevsky knew it cold: his *Diary of a Writer* records reading *Dead Souls* aloud with friends, over and over, and the dark political satire of *Devils* descends straight from Gogol's grotesque social portraiture - Read Gogol first and the comedy underneath Dostoevsky's terror comes into focus — you see the tradition he's weaponizing
- Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin. Devils built on it. - Stavrogin is Onegin taken further into the dark — the same chill aristocrat, now incapable even of the feeling Pushkin allowed his hero - Dostoevsky prized *Eugene Onegin* as "the very first beginnings of our agonising consciousness"; the superfluous idealist Pushkin originated becomes his target in Stepan Verkhovensky - Reading Onegin first shows you the type *Devils* is pushing past — "beyond Pushkin," as Dostoevsky meant it
- Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. Devils built on it. - *Devils* tips its hand on the first page by reaching for Swift — Stepan Trofimovich is Gulliver returned from Lilliput, a giant only in his own imagination - Dostoevsky lifts the image whole, the man crying out to carriages to make way; meeting Swift's traveler first lets you catch exactly how cruelly the comparison cuts
Depicted in Art
The engineer Kirillov in the dark room where he has resolved to shoot himself, lit from a single lamp as Pyotr Verkhovensky waits.
Modest Durnov
Studio photograph of MAT actor Alexei Stakhovich in costume as Stavrogin, in profile, for Nemirovich-Danchenko's 1913 stage adaptation Nikolai Stavrogin.
Karl Fischer, 1913
A working notebook page for Demons: handwritten Russian draft text surrounding Dostoevsky's own pen-drawn Gothic window and ornamental calligraphy.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1871
Notebook page from the composition of Demons: handwritten draft text alongside one of Dostoevsky's own ink portrait sketches.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1871
A heavily revised manuscript page of Demons in Dostoevsky's own hand, dense with crossings-out and marginal additions.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (manuscript), 1871
Recommended Editions
Constance Garnett
Dover · 1916
Garnett translated this as The Possessed, which is what the book was called for most of the twentieth century. Smoother than the Russian, and the version Camus and the early modernists were arguing with.
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Notable Quotes
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.
Screen & Stage
The Possessed
Film · 1988
Andrzej Wajda
The Possessed
Stage · 1959
Albert Camus
Posters via The Movie Database (TMDB)
- Albert Camus, French novelist & philosopher, Nobel laureate, 1913–1960: "Les Possédés is one of the four or five works that I rank above all others."
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Russian novelist, Nobel laureate, 1918–2008: "Dostoevsky's DEVILS … are crawling across the whole world in front of our very eyes."
- Joyce Carol Oates, American novelist & critic (Princeton), b. 1938: "Dostoevsky's most confused and violent novel, and his most satisfactorily “tragic” work."
- Friedrich Nietzsche, German philosopher, 1844–1900: Nietzsche called Dostoevsky 'the only psychologist from whom I had anything to learn' — and read Demons among his novels.
- Jordan Peterson, psychologist, author, 1962–: Lists Demons among the books that most disturbed him, arguing Dostoevsky foresaw totalitarianism's logic decades before the Russian Revolution.
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