What It Is
The book opens with two epigraphs, and the second gives the novel its title. The first is verses by Pushkin about travelers lost in a storm, carried around in circles by a demon, who see a band pass by in lament and ask whether it is the burial of a goblin or the wedding of a witch. The second is the Gospel episode of the swine, Luke 8:32 to 36: the demons come out of a man and enter a herd, the herd rushes off the cliff into the lake and drowns, and the people find the man sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind. The passage stays outside the story for hundreds of pages and enters it only at the end, read aloud by a Gospel seller at the bedside of a dying man, who applies it to Russia, to himself, and to his son.
Where It Appears
In Chapter V of Part One, Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina uses the word figuratively: if her son had had a Horatio at his side, the serene friend of Hamlet, she says, he would have been saved from the demon of irony that torments him. There it is only a figure of speech, and it is she who prepares the literal use of the ending.
In "With Tikhon", Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin tells Bishop Tikhon that at night he sees an evil being, ironic and rational, and asks whether he does not admit that it may really be a demon. He says he believes in the devil canonically, in person and not as an allegory. Tikhon replies that demons undoubtedly exist, but that they can be understood in very different ways. In the document he hands to Tikhon, Stavrogin writes that he declares himself in full possession of his faculties in order to prove that he understands his own situation.
In Chapter VII of Part Three, ill in a village inn, Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky asks Sofya Matveyevna to open the Gospel at the passage of the swine, because he wants her to remember it word for word. It is the passage the chronicler placed at the opening of the book, and the one who reads it is a woman who knows it and recognizes it at once.
Тут же на горе паслось большое стадо свиней [...] Бесы, вышедши из человека, вошли в свиней; и бросилось стадо с крутизны в озеро и потонуло. [...] нашли человека, из которого вышли бесы, сидящего у ног Иисусовых, одетого и в здравом уме, there on the mountain a large herd of swine was grazing [...] The demons, coming out of the man, entered the swine; and the herd rushed down the cliff into the lake and was drowned. [...] they found the man from whom the demons had gone out, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind.
Agitated, Stepan says a comparison has come to him, and it is here that the book hands over the key the narrator did not give.
Эти бесы, выходящие из больного и входящие в свиней, — это все язвы, все миазмы, вся нечистота, все бесы и все бесенята, накопившиеся в великом и милом нашем больном, в нашей России, за века, за века, these demons that come out of the sick man and enter the swine are all the sores, all the miasmas, all the filth, all the demons and little demons that have piled up, for centuries, for centuries, in our great and dear patient, in our Russia.
He does not stop at Russia. He puts himself on the list, next to his son, Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, and at the head of the herd.
Это мы, мы и те, и Петруша [...] и я, может быть, первый, во главе, и мы бросимся, безумные и взбесившиеся, со скалы в море и все потонем, и туда нам дорога, потому что нас только на это ведь и хватит, it is we, we and those others, and Petrusha [...] and I, perhaps the first of all, at the head, and we shall rush, mad and frenzied, from the cliff into the sea, and all of us will drown, and that is our road, because that is all we are good for.
In Chapter VIII of Part Three, in the farewell letter to Darya Pavlovna Shatova, Stavrogin writes about Alexei Kirillov that he was magnanimous in not being in his right mind, and adds that he himself could never lose his mind or believe in an idea to that degree.
Великодушный Кириллов не вынес идеи и — застрелился, но ведь я вижу, что он был великодушен потому, что не в здравом рассудке, the magnanimous Kirillov could not bear the idea and shot himself, but I see that he was magnanimous because he was not in his right mind.
After the hanging, it is the autopsy that settles the question, and it settles it in the opposite direction from the Gospel cure.
Никого не винить, я сам, do not blame anyone, I did it myself. And, after the autopsy,Наши медики по вскрытии трупа совершенно и настойчиво отвергли помешательство, our doctors, after the autopsy, completely and insistently rejected the hypothesis of madness.
What It Means
The parable gives the book a three-part pattern, possession, fall, and cure, and the novel shows the first two in detail. The demons that leave the sick man and enter the swine are, in Stepan's reading, the sores accumulated in Russia over the centuries, and the ones that rush into the lake are the men who receive them. The third stage, the man sitting, clothed and in his right mind, is promised and not shown: Stepan dies confessed and communed, yet still asks for a Great Idea, and Stavrogin is found hanged, with madness ruled out by the doctors.
Two things set this scene apart from the common reading, that the demons are the ideologies that enter men. The first is that the key does not come from the narrator; it comes from a character in a fever, and he includes himself in the account: the allegory stops being an accusation and becomes a confession. The second is that the Gospel reserves "right mind" for the man who has been cured, and the novel gives it to Stavrogin without any cure, in the document he takes to Tikhon and in the autopsy, which makes him someone who does not fall ill and who, for that reason, has nothing to be freed from. There is also an echo the text does not comment on: the herd drowns in the lake, and the body the book throws into the lake, with stones tied to its feet and neck, is that of Ivan Shatov, in Chapter VI of Part Three. 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.
Relationships
- Standard themes: God and the divine, Guilt, Individual and society.
- Themes in the work: God and the divine, Guilt, Individual and society.
- Characters: Darya Pavlovna Shatova, Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin, Tikhon, Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina, Alexei Kirillov, Ivan Shatov.
- Neighboring symbols: The main road, the footpath that takes Stepan to the passage, and The icon and the lamp, the other face of the sacred in the book.