The Worried Talk to God Goes On
On Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Demons" (translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky)
About a third of the way into Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1872 novel Demons (according to the guild of peeved translators everywhere, erroneously translated previously as The Possessed), I had a profound realization about Dostoevsky: he is not, in any traditional sense, a good novelist. His novels are meandering and digressive, tonally uneven, and his characters can sometimes seem like mere mouthpieces for ideas rather than real people. A friend not-too-incorrectly pointed out that you could skip the middle of most Dostoevsky books and not miss much. But like any lover, I’m in too deep to register any of these as flaws; everything that’s bad actually looks good to me. Who needs strict realism, tightly organized plotting, and round characters when you have the righteous fire of Dostoevsky’s shambling novels, their spark of total genius. Herman Melville didn’t follow the rules either! Or Conrad! Hell, even Tolstoy, the Russian author that boring people use as a cudgel against Dostoevsky, had his share of bagginess. (All that farming in Anna Karenina, all that historiography in War and Peace – essential parts of both books, of course, but the most complained about by pseuds.) Demons isn’t my favorite of Dostoevsky’s novels – that would have to be Brothers Karamazov, a book that I think saved my life, or The Idiot, another ramshackle piece of genius – but I’ll never regret reading him, living with him for a couple weeks, and basking in the glow of his mind at work.
Demons is a book about evil, which automatically knocks it down for me a bit – Karamazov and The Idiot are novels that certainly and extensively deal with evil, but are more thematically about goodness. The world of Demons has no great force of goodness, only glimmers here and there that are brutally and literally snuffed out by various schemers and intrigues. The plot is based off the real-life assassination of a student in Russia by a group of nihilist revolutionaries in 1869; Dostoevsky himself had been part of a similar group in his youth before he was arrested, sent to hard labor, sentenced to death, and then pardoned at truly the last possible minute, spurring him towards his political and spiritual shift towards political conservatism and an earthy Russian Orthodox religiousness. Demons is full of scenes laying out what was happening in these groups and the kind of revolution the nihilists were trying to foment, but it’s also full of melodramatic plots (love triangles, duels, secret marriages, suicides, affairs, murders most foul, ballroom drama), deep philosophical discussions, parties that are ruined by not serving food to the guests, and a lot of axe-grinding by Dostoevsky, particularly towards his contemporary rival Ivan Turgenev, who is painted here as a self-important gasbag desperately (and dangerously) trying to hang on to the coattails to a youth culture that has long passed him by.
As if to pip Turgenev a little more, Dostoevsky puts his own Romantic father and nihilist son in Demons, but with a bit less of Turgenev’s ambiguity. (You decide whether that’s a good thing or not.) Both are somewhat ridiculous figures – Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky is a dilettante intellectual who thinks he was an important figure of the 1840s, and his son Pyotr, essentially abandoned by his father, is an incoherent nihilist revolutionary obsessed with power. Stepan has whiled out his year’s on his friend Varvara Petrovna’s property for 20 years, both of them pining after the other but too proud to actually admit it to the other. “There are strange friendships:” the narrator notes, “two friends are almost ready to eat each other, they live like that all their lives, and yet they cannot part.” Such is the rollercoaster of Stepan and Varvara’s codependent relationship. (Eat each other, I love that description of a certain kind of friendship we all know; Pyotr describes it mockingly as “a mutual outpouring of slops,” another gem.) Varvara’s son Nikolai Stravogin was tutored by Stepan Trofimovich in his youth, and now suffers from a deep malaise that sometimes manifests as a kind of madness, committing “impossibly brazen acts upon various persons … with no pretext whatsoever.” (But is there a method to it? Stravogin is compared at various times to Hamlet or King Henry IV, depending on who’s speaking, a good indicator of the prismatic characterization employed throughout the novel.)
Stravogin and Pyotr are joined in town by some of their fellow nihilist/socialist/materialists, including the engineer Kirillov, who has taken his atheistic philosophy to its endpoint and is ready to commit suicide – “Lie if pain, life is fear, and man is unhappy … He who overcomes pain and fear will himself be God. And this God will not be… Whoever wants the main freedom must dare to kill himself” – and the unfortunately named Shatov (even more unfortunate diminutive: Shatushka), who has had second thoughts about the whole ‘nihilist revolutionary group’ thing and wants out. He is one of the good ones in the book, which means he is relentlessly tortured; his belief that the world could be just is one which dooms him amid the wickedness that surrounds him. “Kiss the earth, flood it with tears, ask for forgiveness!” he pleads at one point, a lesson that falls on many a deaf ear. Stravogin is nominally supposed to marry local beauty Lizaveta Nikolaevna, but has mucked with things up after an affair with Shatov’s sister, Darya Pavlovna, as well as his mysterious relationship with Marya Timofeevna, a local holy fool. (She reads the tarot at one point and provides something of a précis for the novel: “It keeps coming out the same: a journey, a wicked man, someone’s perfidy, a deathbed, a letter from somewhere, unexpected news – it’s all lies, I think… If people lie, why shouldn’t cards lie?”)
Pyotr’s goal in coming to town is to create as much disorder as possible, hopefully destabilizing the local government so much as to begin implementing a whole new social order. Exact plans are a bit murky – some want to establish a perfectly rational society, others want pure fascism – but the broader idea is for small cells across Russia to repeat this action, destroying Russia from within via acceleration into disorder. As he explains to his cadre:
In the meantime your whole step is towards getting everything destroyed: both the state and its morality. We alone will remain, having destined ourselves beforehand to assume power: we shall rally the smart ones to ourselves, and ride on the backs of the fools. You should not be embarrassed by it. This generation must be re-educated to make it worthy of freedom.
Whether there are actually other groups following Pyotr’s lead is anyone’s guess, including our narrator’s, a minor character on the periphery of all the action. This narrator, Anton G–v, is a frankly ridiculous narrative device, as he has omniscient access to thoughts and feelings and sometimes minutely describes events that he was nowhere near. (The framing device, I suppose, is that he’s writing an account of what happened in his town, but there are scenes and dialogues that he logically has no access to, even after the fact.) As opposed to the unnamed narrator of Brothers Karamazov, who mostly unobtrusively fades out of the novel, Anton keeps popping up throughout the book, being called hither and thither by characters within the novel, influencing the action, and providing his own judgement on the proceedings. Of one sinister character, Anton writes: “Never in my life have I seen a more grim, gloomy, glowering face on a man. He looked as if he were expecting the destruction of the world, and not just sometime, according to prophecies which might not be fulfilled, but quite definitely, round about morning, the day after tomorrow, at ten twenty-five sharp.” Of a not-so-bright character: “Von Lembke decidedly took to pondering, and pondering was bad from him and forbidden by his doctors.” It’s another bad novelistic choice by Dostoevsky that somehow works; when Anton not in the room itself, he is a master fabulist, his authorial voice entering the fray among the sea of others that make up the novel. (Another good thing about moving: you find the Julia Kristeva book you have on Dostoevsky where she writes of his narrative poetics: “The narrator finds himself alone there, but only just, because he is not really the author but another kind of dialogist, a sort of third party who risk getting mixed up in the story, which proceeds from the dialogue and is composed of thresholds, impasses, and dramatic twists, repeatedly, ad infinitum. The dialogue becomes, with Dostoyevsky, the deep structure of the way of being in the world…”)
The Demons of the title are the rush of ideas that had taken hold of Europe in the mid 19th century. “It was a peculiar time;” the narrator opines,
something new was beginning, quite unlike the former tranquility, something quite strange, but felt everywhere, even in Skvoreshniki. Various rumors arrived. The facts were generally more or less known, but it was obvious that, besides the facts, certain accompanying ideas also appeared, and what’s more, in exceeding numbers. That was what was bewildering: there was no way to adapt and find out just exactly what these ideas meant.
Amid this swirling and opaque morass of ideas and various -isms, some of which persist today and some which faded out quickly back then, the battle lines are drawn over the future of Russia, whether it will be a religious country or one ruled by material interests. To Dostoevsky, that question is really the human vs the inhuman, the unknowable expanse of forgiveness offered by the Christian God vs the strictures of ‘rational’ human government. This is a spot where I would vehemently disagree with Dostoevsky – there’s much about Russian Orthodox belief I find abhorrent, and don’t want that or any American version of it in my government – but I still find myself agreeing with the parameters that Dostoevsky sets up, whether we ought to have a world overseen by an infinite, inscrutable goodness or whether we try to systematize the world and decide, on whatever lines, that there is anything other than essential human equality. The possibility of God in the next world or a false God on this one, it’s up to all these blinkered souls to try and figure that out.
Contrast is the name of the game in Dostoevsky’s novels; the sacred and the profane are right next each other and, yes, in dialogue. Demons is at once tragic, at once enthralling, at once hilarious. It’s the agony and the ecstasy all at once; one can’t exist without the other, but it can be hard to believe in the existence of the ecstasy with all this agony. Two quotes that bear out the gap between how it is and how it might be: the narrator, looking upon a crime scene: “I heard all with but with horror, and though there was no longer anything to be astonished at, still manifest reality always has something shocking about it.” And this, from a suicidal nihilist:
There are seconds, they come only five or six at a time, and you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony, fully achieved. It is nothing earthly; not that it’s heavenly, but man cannot endure it in his earthly state. One must change physically or die. The feeling is clear and indisputable. As if you suddenly sense the whole of nature and suddenly say: yes, this is true. God, when he was creating the world, said at the end of each day of creation: ‘Yes, this is true, this is good.’ This . . . this is not tenderheartness, but simply joy. You don’t forgive anything, because there’s no longer anything to forgive. You don’t really love – oh, what is here is higher than love! What’s most frightening is that it’s so terribly clear, and there’s such joy. If it were longer than five seconds – the soul couldn’t endure it and would vanish. In those five seconds I live my life through, and for them I would give my whole life, because it’s worth it.
The message, when it comes, is garbled, from the wrong messenger, all mixed up, but the point of Dostoevsky is to keep yourself open to it wherever it comes from. They might not be well-constructed novels, but they are awash in dialectic thinking, giving them access to higher truths than your run of the mill, hardily built book. Even though it’s not my favorite Dostoevsky, even if it feels more like a practice session before the total achievement of Karamazov, it still has that touch of the other world, the five seconds of feeling I’d give my whole life for, too.
You can get Demons at your local library or local bookstore. If you must buy online, Bookshop.org supports independent bookstores around the country.
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