Leitmotiv

A word, phrase, or image that returns several times throughout the work, tied to a character or an idea, and gains meaning with each return.

In Demons

I invented him abroad, looking at you yourself. If I had not looked at you from one corner, nothing would have come into my head!..

The verb "invented" returns here after describing, in the first chapter, the relation between Varvara Petrovna and Stepan Trofimovich. The same word links the two scenes: whoever invents someone needs the invented one to obey.

Part Two: Shigalyov's System, Pyotr Stepanovich

Always it has seemed to me that you would take me to some place where there lives an enormous, evil spider, the size of a man, and that we would spend our whole lives there looking at it and being afraid of it.

Part Three: The Party and the Fire, Lizaveta Nikolaevna

They felt that they had suddenly fallen, like flies, into the web of an enormous spider; they were angry, but they trembled with fear.

Part Three: The Last Decision, the chronicler, on the quintet