Demons

About the work

Author

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

Original title

Бесы (Besy)

Publication

Serialized in The Russian Messenger, 1871 to 1872; in book form in 1873

Genre

Novel

Setting

A Russian provincial town in the late 1860s, narrated by a chronicler who lives there

Narrator

First person: a chronicler who takes part in some of the events and reconstructs the rest

Structure

Three parts, plus the chapter "With Tikhon," which the magazine rejected and which was published separately

Protagonists

Stavrogin, Pyotr Stepanovich, and Stepan Trofimovich

Central Theme

In a provincial Russian town, a poorly organized quintet, which believes itself the tip of a worldwide revolutionary network, produces within a few days the disaster of an entire town: a fire that consumes a street, the Lebyadkins with their throats cut, Lizaveta Nikolaevna killed by the mob, Shatov murdered in the park, Kirillov a suicide. The book does not ask whether they will achieve the revolution. It asks how respectable, well-meaning people open the way for them without noticing, and the first answer is a lineage: Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, the idealistic liberal of the 1840s, who spent twenty years in civic pose, living on an allowance and in hysterical friendship, educated Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin and fathered Pyotr Stepanovich, who organizes murders. That is why the novel opens slowly, like a provincial comedy of manners, and not as a political novel.

The second answer is the mechanism, and it is what gives the book its validity beyond the Russia of 1870: the group does not win by force, it wins because the town does not want to seem backward. The governor yields to the logic of liberalism itself, the salon acquits Stavrogin with a single phrase, the matinée audience discovers that it can answer back, and what binds it all together, Pyotr tells Stavrogin, is the shame of having an opinion of one's own. At the center of all of them stands Stavrogin himself, whom each one fights over like a banner: Kirillov and Shatov, his disciples, take seriously the ideas they received from him (the man-god, the people who carry God), Pyotr invented him abroad to make of him a hidden chief, and he refuses every request without finding where to spend his own strength. Shigalyov, author of a system that starts from unlimited freedom and arrives at unlimited despotism, comes from a different root. Pyotr is the only one who believes in no doctrine and makes use of all of them, and he is the only one who escapes.

The Thread That Runs Through the Work

The novel asks how a town disaster is manufactured with few people, little doctrine, and a great deal of exploitation of what was already there, and it answers through what each person hands over without knowing it. Everything begins with a father. Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky is the portrait of the idealistic liberal: he was never exiled nor under surveillance, did not write the work he promised, and the salon talk around him is called, by the chronicler, "superior liberalism" (Part One, Chapter I).

Two sons come out of him, though the father does not see them. Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina invented Stepan and was the first to believe in the invention; Stepan educated her son, Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin, and fathered Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, who appears only through a letter demanding money. When Pyotr enters Varvara's salon, he talks without stopping, recounts Nicolas's story before Nicolas returns, and reads aloud his father's letter about "other people's sins" (Part One, Chapter V). Nicolas describes him in a single sentence, in front of him, with the same coldness with which Pyotr speaks.

The ideas that the others take seriously are Stavrogin's, and they return to his door in the form of a demand. In the night scene of Part Two (Part Two, Chapter I), Alexei Kirillov gives the name of what comes after God, and Ivan Shatov gives the name of the people who carry it.

Neither of the two manages to live the doctrine he announces: Shatov, asked point-blank whether he believes in God, answers only in the future tense, and Kirillov, as will be seen, does not die as he teaches. Stavrogin goes through the visits without accepting any debt, and after the duel in which he fires into the air, he hears from Kirillov what no one else tells him (Part Two, Chapter III).

Pyotr, who has no doctrine, works on the beliefs of others and manages the size of the conspiracy that each listener must accept. To the governor he says the movement fits into three and a half men (Part Two, Chapter VI), and to Virginsky's quintet he leaves faith in a network no one has seen (Part Two, Chapter VII).

In the same room, Shigalyov reads the system he wrote alone: starting from unlimited freedom, he concludes with unlimited despotism. He reaches the conclusion against his will and suffers for it; Pyotr praises it and discards it within the same quarter of an hour, and when Stavrogin asks him what he wants power over him for, Pyotr loses his composure and says what moves him.

The city does the rest of the work on its own. A remark from the governor's wife changes everyone's opinion of Stavrogin in a single afternoon (Part Two, Chapter IV), and on the day of the matinée the leading men, who until then had kept themselves on top, begin to listen and fall silent (Part Three, Chapter I).

When the fire and the deaths come, no one decides alone. Stavrogin knew the Lebyadkins would be killed and did not stop the murderers, and the hand that knocks Lizaveta Nikolaevna down in the crowd is "someone's" (Part Three, Chapter III). Responsibility is spread so that it fits under no single name, and it is from this gap that Pyotr lives.

When the body enters the scene, the doctrine falls apart. In the park, after the shot and the stones, it is Virginsky who cries out (Part Three, Chapter VI), and Pyotr, who had foreseen everything, is startled by what he sees.

The most cited case of the book outside literature is Kirillov's, and it is also the most misread. His doctrine is cold and complete: if God does not exist, self-will is his, and its highest point is to kill oneself. Albert Camus takes him as the limit case of logical suicide in The Myth of Sisyphus, and the reading holds for the argument. The death scene shows something else.

Kirillov laughs, writes a jibe on the paper, hides in a corner, bites Pyotr's finger, and fires only after shouting "now" about ten times. The doctrine is cold; the death is not. Stavrogin performs the exact inversion. He dies without proclaiming any doctrine, and the scene shows premeditation: the soaped cord, the spare nail, the note that says only that no one is to blame, and doctors who, after the autopsy, reject madness (Part Three, Chapter VIII).

The key to the title comes at the end and from a feverish character. Stepan Trofimovich, sick in an inn, asks Sofya Matveyevna for the passage of the pigs and applies it to Russia (Part Three, Chapter VII).

And he includes himself in the reckoning, alongside his son.

The common reading of the title says that the demons are ideologies, which enter men and drive them into the abyss. It is not false, but it stops short of the part the novel explains on its own. The interpreter names himself among the pigs, and the allegory stops being an accusation and becomes a confession. There is also a consequence for Stavrogin. The Gospel reserves "sound mind" for the healed man, seated at the feet of Jesus, and the novel gives it to Stavrogin without the cure: in the document he takes to Tikhon he says he is in full possession of his mind, in the letter to Darya he says he can never lose it, and the doctors confirm it after the autopsy. He has his sound mind and no cure, which makes him the carrier who never falls ill, not the one possessed. Two readings fit Stepan's speech: the lucidity of fever, which tells the truth because it no longer needs an audience, or the last speech of an orator, who still needs one.