Demons

Introduction

Dostoevsky's Demons, probably the greatest novel ever inspired by a revolutionary conspiracy, was not the book that its author had intended to write. The story of how it came into being in its present form is rather a complicated one, involving Dostoevsky's own literary ambitions, the fact that he was living abroad, and the appearance in the Russian and German newspapers, which he read assiduously every day, of stories about an atrocious crime committed in his homeland by a small cell of revolutionaries.

At the time this news appeared, Dostoevsky had been dreaming of writing another type of novel entirely, one that would center on the loss of religious faith and its recovery; but he felt that he could not create such a work before returning to Russia from his European exile. The cause of his prolonged, four-year sojourn in Europe was not, as in the case of Turgenev, a preference for the amenities of European culture, but simply a need to escape from creditors who, on his return, might have thrown him into debtors' prison. The debts involved, incidentally, had not accumulated because of his own imprudence, as is too often assumed, but were those of a failed commercial venture of his deceased older brother, whose obligations he had voluntarily assumed. Dostoevsky's first idea for what became Demons was thus to knock off rapidly what he called a political 'pamphlet', in which he could express all his by now bitter hatred of the radicals and their ideology. It might also, at the same time, bring in sufficient income to enable him to return to Russia, where he would settle down to write the great work that he regarded as the culmination of his literary career. But things did not work out that way.

Dostoevsky was living in Dresden, plagued by financial worries and undecided about what to undertake next. He had recently finished The Idiot, in which he had tried to depict 'an absolutely beautiful man' (Prince Myshkin), who wished to live in the real world and, at the same time, to incorporate the highest Christian virtue of totally selfless love; but this novel had not met with the same success as Crime and Punishment, nor was he by any means satisfied with it himself. In a letter to the critic N. N. Strakhov, defending what he called his 'fantastic realism' ('what the majority calls almost fantastic and exceptional for me sometimes constitutes the very essence of the real'), he nevertheless admitted that 'much in the novel [The Idiot] was written hastily, much is dragged out and does not come off, but something still does come off. I do not stand by my novel but by my idea.’

This 'idea', in its broadest sense, was to create a positive artistic image to counter the influence of the ideology of Russian radicalism in the 1860s. The intellectual leaders of this movement - N. G. Chernyshevsky, N. Dobrolyubov, D. Pisarev - are little known except to students of Russian culture, but they exercised an enormous influence and determined the literary-cultural ambiance in which Dostoevsky was writing. These critics and publicists (though Chernyshevsky also wrote a famous and influential novel, What Is To Be Done?) were not only atheists who rejected God and the divinity of Christ, but they also attempted to substitute for the Christian morality of love and self-sacrifice one based on a purely homebrewed Russian amalgam of Benthamite Utilitarianism and Utopian Socialist idealism (labelled 'rational egoism'). Dostoevsky's great aim was not only to reveal the disastrous human consequences to which such an ideology might lead (as he had done with both the underground man and, more explicitly, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment), but also to rehabilitate the Christian ideal against all its gainsayers. It is thus not surprising that, even before completing the fourth and last part of The Idiot, he should have thought of another embodiment of the same thematic ambition.

In December 1868, writing to his oldest friend, the poet Apollon Maikov, Dostoevsky confides his plan for 'a huge novel whose title would be Atheism', asking his friend to keep the idea secret ('for God's sake, let this remain between us'). The passage is too lengthy to quote entire, but it involves a main character who loses his religious faith, and then embarks on a quest to find a substitute ideal. He goes off in search of this alternate faith among a large variety of competing groups: 'the atheists, the Slavs and Europeans [i.e., the Slavophils and Westernizers], the Russian fanatics, anchorites, the priests'; he even flirts with Polish Jesuits, but 'slips away from them to the depths of the flagellants [Russian sectarians] - and in the end finds Christ and the Russian God'. The importance of this project for Dostoevsky could not be more forcefully expressed: 'Let me write this final novel,' he declares, 'and even if I die - I will have spoken out about everything.'

It was to take another year, however, before Dostoevsky could get around even to making notes for this project. Instead, to obtain some much needed funds (his wife had just given birth to a daughter), he wrote The Eternal Husband with great reluctance, although his expressed aversion to doing so did not prevent him from turning out a small masterpiece, the most classically perfect of all his shorter works. But it was only in December 1869 that he could think of his Atheism novel again, which by this time had turned into a much larger idea for a work in several volumes to be called The Life of a Great Sinner. Never written as such, this projected series furnished material for Demons, as well as for Dostoevsky's two last novels, A Raw Youth and The Brothers Karamazov.

His ideas for The Life of a Great Sinner were sketched in his notebooks between December 1869 and January 1870, and Dostoevsky told Apollon Maikov in the first week of December that he would be sitting down to begin writing 'in three days'. But just a month later, he excitedly reported to Maikov that he had been inspired by a new theme. 'I have tackled a rich idea,' he tells him enthusiastically. 'I am not speaking of the execution but of the idea. One of the ideas that has an undoubted resonance among the public. Like Crime and Punishment but even closer to reality, more vital, and having direct relevance for the most important contemporary issue.' Dostoevsky was certain that he would be able to finish this novel by the fall of 1870, and that, since its topicality might have the same financial success as Crime and Punishment, 'there is hope of putting all my affairs in order and of returning to Russia ... Never have I worked with such enjoyment and such ease.'

This is the first reference to Demons in Dostoevsky's correspondence, and we can see the novel beginning to take shape in his notebooks while, at the same time, he continued to add material to his 'great sinner' corpus (some notes are dated from as late as March 1870). But what was the idea that had so gripped Dostoevsky, and which had 'direct relevance to the most important contemporary issue'? It was the murder, committed during November 1869, of a young student at the Petrovsky Agricultural Academy in Moscow by a revolutionary group headed by Sergei Nechaev; and one can see why Dostoevsky thought that his proposed idea was 'even closer to reality' than Crime and Punishment. In that novel, he had invented a crime inspired by the supposedly humanitarian aims of radical ideology, but now 'reality' had finally caught up with what he had foreseen would be the results of 'rational egoism' in practice.

News about the crime began to appear in the Russian and foreign press about a month after it was committed, and while it certainly would have attracted Dostoevsky's notice in any case, the name and activities of Nechaev had come to his attention even earlier. It so happened that Dostoevsky's young brother-in-law, Ivan Snitkin, was a student in this very Academy and had been visiting with the Dostoevskys in the fall of 1869. Dostoevsky's wife, Anna Grigoryevna, thus attributed the origin of the novel to Dostoevsky's conversations with her young brother; but this exhibition of pardonable family pride is highly exaggerated. At most, Ivan Snitkin may have spoken to Dostoevsky about Nechaev's organizing activites at his school before the murder actually took place, but he could have known nothing else; nor is there any evidence in Dostoevsky's notes that he thought of a novel involving a political murder before the story broke in the newspapers. Indeed, Dostoevsky himself affirmed, in a letter to his editor Mikhail Katkov a year later, that 'I know nothing at all about Nechaev, nor Ivanov [the victim], nor the circumstances of the murder, except from the newspapers.'

What Dostoevsky learned from these newspapers confirmed some of his worst fears, which had become particularly exacerbated during his self-imposed European exile, about the disintegrating effect that the Western-imported ideas of the Russian Nihilism of the 1860s was exercising on the moral fibre of Russian society. Sergei Nechaev, whose extraordinary force of personality seemed to exercise a hypnotic effect on all those who knew him, had carried the Utilitarian component of 'rational egoism' to its farthest extreme by advocating a total Machiavellianism — one which included, not only deception and falsity against one's enemies, but also against friends and allies if this became necessary for the cause. In his own case, Nechaev created a completely false myth about himself as having been arrested, and then accomplishing the unprecedented feat of escaping from the Peter-and-Paul fortress (where Dostoevsky himself had once been imprisoned). When Nechaev contacted the veteran revolutionaries Mikhail Bakunin and Nikolai Ogarev in Geneva, enveloped in the aureole of his supposed exploits, he represented himself as the delegate of a powerful and perfectly fictitious underground organization; and Pyotr Verkhovensky presents himself in the same fashion to the awed members of his revolutionary cell, as well as to all those assembled in the superb scene in which 'the progressives' of the town gather for a meeting. Dostoevsky read Nechaev's blood-curdling Catechism of a Revolutionary (probably written in collaboration with Bakunin), only after the first part of Demons had already appeared. But he was convinced that he had nonetheless created a character, Pyotr Verkhovensky, who embodied all the unscrupulousness and ruthlessness of its precepts, and the Catechism itself, though perhaps adding a few extra details, only helped to confirm his creation. Pyotr Verkhovensky, he told Katkov, does not resemble the real-life Nechaev in any way, but 'my aroused mind has created by imagination the person, the type, that really corresponds to the crime'. The image of this type, however, did not emerge all at once, but underwent a crucial metamorphosis as the writing of the book proceeded.

Pyotr Verkhovensky is a product of the ideology of the 1860s, and the members of this generation, almost from the very start, had defined themselves in opposition to the generation of the 1840s (to which Dostoevsky himself belonged). This conflict of generations had been brilliantly depicted in Turgenev's Fathers and Children, a novel that Dostoevsky greatly admired, and in which the main younger character, a medical student named Bazarov, treated members of the older generation with a pitying and condescending contempt. He had no tolerance at all for their high-minded Romantic and idealistic velleities, even though these had played a part in helping to abolish serfdom and had led to a more humanitarian attitude toward the peasantry. But Bazarov had no patience with exalted sentiment of any kind, including that expressed in art, and proclaimed himself a Nihilist who believed nothing except what could be established through science and materialism (he spends a good part of his time dissecting frogs).

This opposition between the generations, so indelibly portrayed by Turgenev, also gave rise to a whole series of polemical exchanges throughout the mid-1860s to which Dostoevsky paid the closest attention, and on which he drew for his own novel. In 1867, he quarrelled personally with Turgenev, at least in part because of an anti-Russian tirade in Turgenev's novel, Smoke; and in the course of their heated exchange of unpleasantries, he advised his fellow novelist to acquire a telescope so that he could see Russia more clearly from the latter's European residence. In reporting on this incident to Maikov, Dostoevsky already anticipates the clash of generations as he would later present it. 'The difference [between the generations]' he wrote, 'is that Chernyshevsky's followers simply criticize Russia openly and wish for its collapse,' while the older radicals of the 1840s like Turgenev, who are 'Belinsky's offspring, [Belinsky was the greatest literary critic of the 1840s, a political radical and Westernizer] add that they love Russia.' (italics in text) The tragi-comic quarrel between Pyotr and his father, the marvellously delineated Stepan Trofimovich, whom Dostoevsky both pillories and glorifies at the same time, is already implicit in these words.

Once having decided to write a topical novel, Dostoevsky started by reworking some of his old notes in which embryonic images of his later characters already appear. There is a Romantic poet who calls himself 'a pagan' and 'deifies nature' (Stepan Trofimovich); there is a lame girl, whose father is a drunken lieutenant, and 'who goes begging in a noble fashion' (Captain Lebyadkin and his lame sister Marya); there is also the beginning of a political plot. 'Nechaev, Kulishov had denounced Nechaev ... The police enter and capture [presumably Nechaev].' Dostoevsky also sketches a romantic rivalry between a Prince, 'a pathetic figure', and a Schoolteacher, obviously a moral exemplar; both are competing for the affections of a young girl called the Ward (Darya Shatov), who has been raised by the Prince's mother (Mme Stavrogin).When the Prince seduces the Ward, the mother wants to marry her off to the Schoolteacher with a dowry; but he refuses the dowry and becomes her friend instead. This plot intrigue, provisonally entitled Envy, ends with the Prince marrying the Ward because he wishes to emulate the superior moral qualities of the Teacher.

There are also some other features of these early notes that foreshadow the final text. The locale of the action is set in a populous provincial society ('a large group gathered in the rural countryside'), and this somnolent and lethargic world has become infiltrated and undermined by Nihilist ideas. Nihilist ideas are being spread by 'a neighbor ... very wealthy, and with students'; even the morally positive Teacher is 'a Nihilist up to a point, does not believe'. One may see him as a protoype of the later Shatov, also a figure of sterling moral purity and wrestling with the problem of religious faith. Just how these two themes - the romantic and the political - will be interwoven is by no means clear; but the way forward is indicated by another note: 'Proclamations. Fugitive appearance of Nechaev, to kill the Teacher(?).' Dostoevsky's question mark indicates his uncertainty as yet, but he has introduced a political murder that intersects with the sentimental intrigue of Envy, and this is the path that he will continue to follow, interweaving the private and the political ever more closely as he goes along. His next task is to integrate this plot structure with the ideological conflict-of-generations theme that will provide his novel with so much of its satirical bite.

An important aid in this task was a review article that N. N. Strakhov had written the year before about a recent biography of T. N. Granovsky, a liberal historian who had enjoyed a brief moment of fame in the 1840s. Strakhov had defined him as 'a pure Westernizer', who had sympathized with everything that was 'sublime and beautiful' in European culture, but who, like all the others of the same stripe, had nonetheless been one of the forefathers of the Russian Nihilism that the surviving members of this generation had since been denouncing. Indeed, the detestation was reciprocal, 'and the Nihilist children themselves have now taken to renouncing their fathers'. Whether Dostoevsky recalled this article, or had it at hand, it certainly inspired a note labelled ' T. M Granovsky ... a pure and idealistic Westernizer,' whose 'aimlessness and lack of firmness in his views ... which ... used to cause him suffering before ... have now become his second nature (his son makes fun of this tendency).' (italics in text) Dostoevsky wrote to Strakhov asking him to dispatch a copy of the book about Granovsky as quickly as possible, and in a later letter explains: 'I wish to speak out about several matters even though my artistry goes smash. What attracts me is what has piled up in my mind and heart; let it give only a pamphlet, but I shall speak out.'

Once Granovsky had become the prototype of the character representing the 1840s, Dostoevsky could imagine him very clearly and concretely. 'Places himself unconsciously on a pedestal, in the style of relics to be worshipped by pilgrims, and loves it ... Shuns Nihilism and does not understand it ... "Leave me God and art, and I will let you have Christ" ... Christ did not understand women ... Literary recollections, Belinsky, Granovsky, Herzen ... Turgenev and others.' Stepan Trofimovich does not merely 'recollect' all these figures of his generation but also represents them because they become part of his own character as well. Dostoevsky's artistic practice, even if he started as here with an identifiable prototype, was never simply to delineate an individual; he allowed himself the greatest freedom to create by amalgamation a 'type' that would portray his conception. Hence Stepan Trofimovich fuses Granovsky with Alexander Herzen, who had taken on Chernyshevsky himself in his slashing article, The Superfluous and the Bilious, and who defended the importance and dignity of art - just as Stepan Trofimovich does in the unsurpassed fête scene of the novel - against what Herzen called 'the Daniels of the Neva'.

If Dostoevsky could immediately grasp the character of Stepan Trofimovich in all the pathetic splendor of his faded glory, it took him a considerable amount of time to arrive at his definitive portrait of Pyotr Verkhovensky. At first, he saw him as another, though much more sinister, incarnation of Bazarov. Now called 'the Student,' he 'appears with the aim of counterfeit money, proclamations and groups of three ... Troubles his father (Granovsky) by his Nihilism, his sarcasms, contradictions. Simple, straightforward ... Rebuild the world ... Bazarov.' (italics in text) This is very far from being the Pyotr of the novel, who is anything but 'simple, straightforward', though his relation to his father will remain unchanged. Even less like the final Pyotr is another note, in capital letters: 'THE STUDENT AS A HERO OF OUR TIME'. The Student will thus be endowed with some of the Romantic, Byronic traits of Lermontov's Pechorin, the protagonist of his famous novel, A Hero of Our Time. The Prince is still in love with the Ward, and a group of three kill a character called Shaposhnikov (the later Shatov) for fear of being denounced. They attempt to throw the blame on the Prince, between whom and Shaposhnikov there is a supposed mutual hatred because the Prince has dishonored Shaposhnikov's sister (the Ward), etc., etc. (there are a plethora of plot variations that Dostoevsky tries out to motivate the accusation against the Prince). What originated as the idea of an innocent person being accused of the murder eventually becomes that of an innocent person, Kirillov, voluntarily assuming the guilt.

Once such an accusation against the Prince is made, however, this hitherto colorless and conventional Romantic prop 'immediately unravels everything ... obliges Uspensky [a member of the group of three, whose name is that of one of Nechaev's actual accomplices] to confess and firmly denounces to the Governor.' The Prince then marries the Ward, as in Envy, and Dostoevsky notes: 'The principal idea (that is, the pathos of the novel) is the Prince and the Ward - new people who have surmounted temptation and have resolved to begin a new regenerated life.' (italics in text) The problem, though, is that Dostoevsky had not given much thought earlier to the Prince, and now finds himself called upon to provide some adequate motivation for his heroic behavior. 'In general,' he writes, 'at the end of the novel nobody suspects such a strong and ardent character in the Prince'; but this implies that he would be portrayed as a mediocrity in the eyes of society throughout most of the text. To avoid such an unpromising prospect, Dostoevsky then conceives of him as a haughty aristocrat, contemptuous of all those around him, but then also endows him with a passionate religiosity. 'Despises the atheists to the point of fury, believes furiously. Wishes to be a muzhik; Old Believer.' (italics in text) With this, the political 'pamphlet' begins to move into the realm of the religious thematic to which it had been intended as an alternative.

Dostoevsky had expected that he would be able to write his 'pamphlet-novel' very quickly, but almost a year after beginning he wrote to Strakhov: 'All year I only tore up and made alterations, I blackened so many mounds of paper that I even lost my system of references for what I had written. I have modified the plan not less than ten times, and completely written the first part each time.' What was causing him so much difficulty? Part of the answer is that, once having begun to provide the Prince with a religious motivation, the character began to deepen in a way that Dostoevsky had not foreseen. Until March 1870, he had clung to his initial plan of the Prince and the Ward as 'new people', who would emerge triumphant from the the machinations of Nechaev and the ordeal of the murder; but suddenly all this is changed. After the Prince unravels the murder plot as before, and declares that 'it is necessary to believe ... [that] Russia and Russian thought will save humanity ... he [the Prince] prays before icons ... And then suddenly, he blows his brains out. -(Enigmatic personage, said to be mad).' This note turns the Prince into a genuinely tragic character, beset by a crisis of faith like 'the great sinner', and his two projects thus begin to merge in Dostoevsky's imagination.

Dostoevsky then immediately develops this new image of the Prince, who would become Stavrogin by the end of March ('stavros' in Greek means cross). In a transitional note, Dostoevsky writes: 'The Prince — a man who has become bored. Product of Russian century.' (italics added) Previously, the Prince had turned for ideological guidance to Shatov and Golubov (the real name of a writer on religious issues, a former Old Believer who had returned to Orthodoxy, and whose articles had impressed Dostoevsky); but now Golubov is dropped, and it is the Prince 'who inflames him [Shatov] with enthusiasm, but does not believe himself. A page later, there is a reference to the Prince as having 'violated a child of thirteen years of age, which created some stir'; and he is described as 'gentle, modest, quiet, infinitely proud and bestially cruel ... all the pathos of the novel in the Prince; he is the hero'. What had begun as a satirical depiction of the clash of generations, with Stepan Trofimovich and his son as the central characters, has now become one revolving around Stavrogin, who inspires others with beliefs that he does not share, and is himself 'a product of the Russian century'.

This last phrase is of considerable importance because it helps to clarify the particular social-historical coloring that Dostoevsky will give to his character. The remark about Stavrogin's 'boredom', the famous mal de siècle, links him with the Russian Byronic type first created by Pushkin in Evgeny Onegin; and like Baudelaire and many others, Dostoevsky attributed this sense of ennui to a loss of that religious faith which had previously provided a meaning to the universe and to human life. In an essay dating from 1861, in which he had defended Pushkin's creation against the charge of being merely an upper-class wastrel, Dostoevsky had seen him as the first artistic expression of a crisis of the Russian spirit - a crisis caused both by the assimilation into the Russian moral-social psyche of all the attainments of European civilization, and the realization of the European-educated upper class that this assimilation had deprived them of contact with their own native roots (which for Dostoevsky always meant the religious roots still deeply embedded in the soil of Russian peasant life). 'The skepticism of Onegin,' he had written, 'contained something tragic in its very principle, and sometimes expressed itself with malicious irony.'

This type then entered into the bloodstream of Russian culture, and produced the already-mentioned Pechorin, who combined 'an egoism extending to the limits of self-adoration, and a malicious self-contempt'. The latest avatar of this Russian Byronism is Stavrogin, whose moral-psychological attributes fit these words to perfection, but who combines them with something new - a malignancy, as the narrator of the novel puts it, that was 'cold, calm, and, if one may put it so, reasonable and therefore the most repulsive and terrible that can be'. Moreover, the creation of this Onegin-type by Pushkin, as Dostoevsky saw it, then gave birth to the epoch when 'our leading men sharply separated into two camps ... The Slavophils and the Westernizers were also a historical manifestation and in the highest degree national.' The Slavophils, whose ideas Dostoevsky largely shared, believed that Russian culture should (and would) follow an independent path quite different from that of Europe; the Westernizers believed it was essential for Russia to follow the European model of social-cultural development more and more closely. Stavrogin, as the very latest incorporation of this Onegin-type, is thus flanked by the two disciples whom he had indoctrinated, Shatov and Kirillov, and who unforgettably embody the essence of these two doctrines as Dostoevsky envisaged them (the effort to return to the religious sources of Russian life on the one hand, the triumph of a self-destructive rationalism on the other). The structure of this relationship, which has aroused some perplexity, derives from this view of the whole development of Russian cultural self-consciousness.

Dostoevsky had promised Katkov that he would begin sending chapters of his new novel by June 1870, but found himself unable to meet the deadline even though he had been piling up manuscript and constantly adding new ideas and aperçus to his notes. But he was dissatisfied with what he had written, and felt that there was a problem that he had not yet solved. 'The work went slowly,' he told his niece in mid-August. 'I felt that there was an important error in the whole thing, but what it was - I could not figure out.' By that time he had written fifteen signatures (approximately 240 pages), which unfortunately have not survived in their initial form. During July, his epileptic attacks had been so frequent and so severe that he found it impossible to write at all (they usually incapacitated him for several days, sometimes as long as a week); but perhaps this respite from composition was a blessing in disguise. In any event, when he returned to his desk in August, 'I suddenly saw all at once what the trouble was, and where I had made a mistake ... a new plan appeared in all its proportions ... I struck out everything I had written ... and I began on page 1.' This does not mean, however, that Dostoevsky simply discarded his earlier manuscript; he told Katkov a month later that twelve of the fifteen signatures had been integrated into the new version, though obviously entirely rewritten.

Dostoevsky never explained to any of his correspondents what he discovered his 'mistake' to have been, but some plausible inferences may be drawn from his notes and comments. In mid-August, under the heading 'Something New', we find the following: 'And Nechaev appears on the scene like Khlestakov.' No longer Bazarov or Pechorin, Nechaev is now seen as the ingratiating, fast-talking impostor of Gogol's Réviser, who adapts himself compliantly to whatever role he is cast in by the incomprehension of those around him. Dostoevsky presumably realized that Stavrogin, in becoming an Onegin-type, now embodied the Romantic, Byronic traits formerly attributed to Nechaev-Verkhovensky, and the latter is thus recast in a subordinate and semi-comic role. As Dostoevsky told Katkov: 'To my surprise, this figure [Pyotr Verkhovensky] half turns out to be a comic figure'; and the reason is that 'the whole incident of the murder ... is nonetheless only-accessory and a setting for the actions of another character ... (Nikolai Stavrogin),' who is not only 'a sinister character' but also a tragic one. Once having reconceived his image of Verkhovensky, Dostoevsky solved the problem that had been troubling him subliminally, and he kept his promise to Katkov that he would furnish enough text to begin publishing by January 1871.

Even though Dostoevsky's writing went smoothly from this time on, his problems with the novel were by no means over. A good part of Demons was published in installments during 1871, despite the disturbance caused by the Dostoevskys' return to Russia in July (the manuscripts of The Idiot, The Eternal Husband and the early drafts of Demons were all burned for fear of running into trouble at the border). But publication stopped after the November issue, when Part One and eight chapters of Part Two had already appeared, and did not resume until almost a year later. The reason was that, in what was intended as chapter 9 of Part Two, Dostoevsky describes a visit by Stavrogin, assailed by hallucinations of various mocking 'devils', to a nearby monastery to seek for spiritual aid from the monk Tikhon. This name and character come from an eighteenth-century saint whom Dostoevsky admired, St Tikhon Zadonsky, who plays an important role in The Life of a Great Sinner and has been taken over from there (he later also provided inspiration for Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov). Stavrogin asks Tikhon to read a confession in which he describes his seduction of a twelve-year-old girl, whose suicide he then does nothing to prevent. Dostoevsky was told that Katkov would not print this chapter, but no final decision was taken on its exclusion until just before the November issue of 1872.

Meanwhile, Dostoevsky made attempts at revision which left the question of an actual rape uncertain, hoping this would be enough to satisfy 'the modesty' of his editors; he also read this chapter to his literary friends to obtain their advice (which later led to ugly and totally unfounded rumors, handed down to posterity, that he was actually confessing a misdeed of his own). Continuing to forge ahead with the remainder of the book, he wrote on the assumption that his contested chapter would be accepted in its revised form; but publication continued to be delayed. It was only a year later, just before publication resumed, that he received a definitive refusal, and he then worked frantically on the galleys to give his remaining text whatever coherence he could.

One addition, made at the last moment to the original manuscript of Part Three, is of some importance - the scene in which the dying Stepan Trofimovich listens to the reading of a passage from St Luke (Dostoevsky also uses this passage as epigraph), about the devils entering into a herd of swine and drowning in the sea. It is under the inspiration of this passage from the Gospels that the repentant Westernizer declares himself to be one of the devils, and perhaps their progenitor. It is possible that, if Dostoevsky's initial chapter 9 had been accepted, he would have assigned more responsibility to Stavrogin, whose social-cultural coloration makes him the far more plausible (and historically accurate) source of Dostoevsky's ideological devils. The original plot assignment of Stepan Trofimovich as Stavrogin's tutor, who is thus presumably the cause of all the moral-ideological maladies of his pupil, is obviously a structural hangover from the earlier plan before the Prince had been transformed into Stavrogin and taken over the book.

However that may be, chapter 9 vanished among Dostoevsky's papers and was only unearthed in 1922, although parts of it (the dream of a Golden Age of innocence, mirrored by a classical Greek landscape taken from Claude Lorrain's painting, Acis and Galatea) were used in A Raw Youth. There has been a continual dispute over whether it still belongs to the book, but the consensus is that it should certainly be read if we are to grasp the moral-philosophical inspiration underlying Dostoevsky's remarkable character. For here we see, as one variant of the chapter tells us, that Stavrogin was not simply a perverse moral monster; he was, rather, carrying out a sacrilegious moral-philosophical experiment on himself to ascertain whether it were true that 'I neither know nor feel good and evil and that I have not only lost any sense of it, but that there is neither good nor evil (which pleased me) and that it is just a prejudice.' Dostoevsky wrote in a letter that 'I took him [Stavrogin] from my heart', and in my view he meant a heart that was aching because the glamorous radiance of this 'product of the Russian century', the finest flower of the Russian absorption of European culture, should have been doomed to such a tragic destiny.

Demons is thus a totally original amalgam, one part of which contains a brilliantly ironic depiction of the conflict of generations in Russian culture and displays all of Dostoevsky's still insufficiently recognized talents as a satirist and a parodist. The portrait of Stepan Trofimovich is unsurpassed in the Russian novel, and the more one knows about the Russian culture of the period the more one marvels at Dostoevsky's intellectual sophistication, skill and sureness of touch. The foibles, the weaknesses, the impotence, the self-pampering pretensions of the personage are all there, and the jibes of Pyotr Verkhovensky against his father hit home time and again. One also laughs at the tempestuous vagaries of his beautifully Platonic relationship with his strong-willed patroness; but we are also shown the genuine sweetness of spirit, the occasional pangs of conscience, and the sincere devotion to the ideal.

For all his detestation of his own generation, Dostoevsky much preferred it to the cold, Utilitarian, Nihilist rationalists of the 1860s; and the final chapter of Stepan Trofimovich's last wanderings is a wonderful mélange of tender mockery and slyly humorous reverence. It is also, incidentally, a totally unintended but prescient foreshadowing of what would actually occur a year later, when a new generation of young radicals decided 'to go to the people,' and were met by them with the same bewilderment that greeted the itinerant scholar. Dostoevsky is more pitiless with the figure of Karmazinov, a caricature of Turgenev, with whom he had a personal bone to pick; but there were also ample social-cultural reasons in the mid-1870s to motivate Dostoevsky's lampoon. The parody of Turgenev's prose-poems perfectly catches their mannerisms and is hilariously funny; so is the entire boisterous helter-skelter of the fête scene, with its wicked takeoff on Karmazinov's world-weary farewell to literature that nobody takes seriously. Such a large-scale assault on a fellow writer has no rival, except perhaps Dickens's attack on Leigh Hunt in the Harold Skimpole of Bleak House, with which Dostoevsky, a great reader of Dickens, was certainly familiar.

Dostoevsky combines all these pages of irresistible satirical comedy with what seems to be their very opposite, the tragic theme of an unsuccessful quest for religious faith and personal salvation by 'a great sinner'. He has often been criticized for attempting to unite what seems, at first sight, to be such disparate material; but this criticism misunderstands the nature of his genius, and measures him by standards that are quite irrelevant to his poetics. Dostoevsky was one of the few novelists of the nineteenth century (rivalled in this respect perhaps only by Balzac) who could still feel the universe and human life as directly related to the ultimate questions about human life that are posed and answered only by religion. This is one reason why, in reading him, one is so constantly reminded of works produced in the great eras of poetic tragedy, when the relationship of man to the gods or to God was so much more instinctive and spontaneous. In general, characters in the novel do not usually relate their own mundane problems and dilemmas so immediately to the 'accursed questions' that always remained in the foreground of Dostoevsky's purview.

It is no accident that, in The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan speaks nostalgically of the time when 'it was customary to bring down heavenly powers on earth' in literature, and mentions Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris as a modern novel in which a mystery play of this kind is depicted — one in which the Virgin Mary descends to earth. Dostoevsky, it might be said, tried to do the same with the world of the Virgin Mary (or to use a more Russian appellation, the Mother of God) in his own mode of 'fantastic realism', which remained within the realistic conventions of the nineteenth-century novel but enormously extended their usual range. He made realism 'fantastic' by using the extreme situations of melodrama or the criminal adventure novel, which he then elevated to the level of high tragedy by handling their sordid conflicts in terms of the transcendent values of religious faith. For him, the Machiavellianism of Pyotr Verkhovensky, purely social-political in nature, issued the same challenge to the moral basis of human life and society as did the personal experiment of Stavrogin to abolish his feeling for the distinction between good and evil. Both, in Dostoevsky's imagination, derived from the Western rationalism that he saw as inevitably leading to the replacement of the God-man Christ, with his morality of love, by the Man-god of egoism and power embodied in Stavrogin, Pyotr, and most nobly of all in Kirillov. It was because Dostoevsky possessed so acute a sense of this relation between the religious and the social that he was able to create the unparalleled and artistically viable synthesis between his 'pamphlet' and what he later called his 'poem', which was unfortunately weakened - though by no means destroyed - by the suppression of chapter 9.

One of the questions that inevitably arises about Demons is whether it should not be judged as an unpardonable slander on the Russian radicals who were valiantly struggling, against impossible odds, to create a brave new world. That the book is certainly hostile to the radicalism of its time goes without saying, but to call it 'slander' is very excessive; this would imply that Dostoevsky deliberately distorted and blackened the historical record so as to depict the radicals in the worst possible light. It is true that Dostoevsky gives the Nechaev affair much more importance than it actually warranted in the context of the time; no such widespread disturbances occurred as are depicted in the novel. But so far as the aims and tactics of Nechaev are concerned, as well as his actions and those of his followers, everything in the novel can be supported by what he and they actually did, or, as their propaganda made clear, would have liked to do if given the chance. Nor, in considering this question, should one overlook - though it is usually hardly noticed - the scathing image equally given of the stupidity of the reaction of the authorities in the person of the pitiful Governor-General von Lembke, whose half-crazed attempt at severity only succeeds in throwing oil on the fire of discontent.

It is also worth noting that, while the publication of Demons ruined Dostoevsky's standing with Russian progressives and the radical youth (though his repudiation by the young was only temporary), the new groups that began to reorganize in the early 1870s very self-consciously set themseves off from Nechaev and the moral miasma of his methods - which would indicate that Dostoevsky's portrayal of them was hardly as defamatory as has been charged, and possibly may even have had some effect. Moreover, it was not only the anti-radical Dostoevsky who was revolted by Nechaev and his tactics, with all their murderous consequences. Alexander Herzen, too, denounced the propaganda of Nechaev as leading to the provocation and unleashing of 'the worst passions'; and Marx and Engels used the Nechaev affair to have Bakunin and his followers booted out of the First International. 'These all-destroying anarchists,' they declared sententiously, 'who wish to reduce everything to amorphousness and to replace morality by anarchy, carry bourgeois (?) morality to its final extreme.'

Dostoevsky liked to recite Pushkin's poem, 'The Prophet', at benefit readings, and he was often hailed as 'a prophet' in his own lifetime. Such an accolade was usually stimulated by the references that he made, much like Shatov in the novel, to the future glories of the all-reconciling Christian world civilization that it was the God-given destiny of Russia to bring into being. If anything in his work is truly prophetic, however, it is his depiction of the radicals and the spread of their ideas in Demons. One cannot praise too highly the devastating portrayal of how the 'fashionable' progressive ideas brought from the capital permeate the stagnating provincial society, and how the 'radical chic' of the wife of Governor-General von Lembke, which arouses the envy of Mme Stavrogin herself, only paves the way for such infiltration. The 'birthday party' at the Virginskys', which turns into a meeting of the local progressives, begins as a comic adolescent quarrel between a schoolboy and his female counterpart travelling round the country to raise the consciousness of students; but there is nothing comic about the troubled discovery announced by the radical 'theoretican' Shigalyov, who has been tackling the problem of defining the conditions for achieving the earthly paradise. 'Starting from unlimited freedom,' he has noted to his dismay, 'I conclude with unlimited despotism.' (This has certainly become the most quoted passage in the book.) It is little wonder that a fairly recent (1990) Russian study of the novel should be entitled: Roman—Preduprezhdenie - 'A Novel of Warning'. And the historian and critic Yury Karyakin, writing of the period just after Khrushchev had lifted the curtain on Stalin's crimes against humanity, cites the remark made to him with 'a sorrowful smile' by a friend, 'a typical Stepan Trofimovich', with a doctorate in chemistry and who played the flute: 'But you know, all this is in Demons. I was almost arrested in '36 because I read the novel. Someone denounced me...'

What is most remarkable, however, is that Dostoevsky still manages to make the dupes of Pyotr so pathetically and appealingly human amidst all their follies and delusions; they are very far from being scoundrels or villains whose motives are base or ignoble. One should always remember that Dostoevsky had himself been involved in a genuine revolutionary conspiracy in 1849 (it was a secret he kept concealed all his life), whose aim had been the abolition of serfdom; and he never accepted the official view that those who plotted against the state should simply be viewed as criminals. Indeed, just a year after Demons had been completed, he admitted in an article that he himself might have become 'a Nechaevist ... in the days of my youth'.

What he had tried to show in Demons, he explained, was that 'even the purest of hearts and the most innocent of people can be drawn into committing such a monstrous offence'. The group around Nechaev, as he depicts them, are hardly 'the purest and the most innocent', but neither are they vile or fundamentally corrupt. They by no means approve of Pyotr's desire to spread disruption and chaos, nor of his instigation of Shatov's murder; but Dostoevsky understood how mass psychology, as well as fear, could overcome the most recalcitrant. He himself had once called Nikolai Speshnev, the leader of his underground group (very probably a biographical prototype for Stavrogin), his 'Mephistopheles', which meant that he knew how it felt to be persuaded to act against one's will in the name of a sacred cause. The scene in which Pyotr brings his rebellious pack to heel is a masterful lesson in the psycho-dynamics of group persuasion.

One could go on indefinitely exploring all the riches of Demons on various levels, and its relation both to its author and the period with which it deals. So far as the latter is concerned, it is practically an encyclopedia of the Russian culture of its time, filtered through a witheringly derisive and often grotesquely funny perspective. Nothing in the European novel compares with it, except perhaps Balzac's Les Illusions perdues or Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale - the latter most of all because of its equally disillusioned view of Socialism, more disillusioned, in fact, than Dostoevsky's. For Pyotr Verkhovensky, who is nothing if not self-conscious, declares to Stavrogin, in the scene where he explains his plan to make him Ivan the Tsarevich: 'I'm a crook, not a Socialist, ha ha!' Dostoevsky has hardly been given enough credit for this disclaimer, which allowed Russian critics in the late Stalinist period to argue that he was not in fact attacking Russian radicalism as a whole but only its anarchist wing.

Once, when evoking his past, Dostoevsky recalled how, even before he had learned to read, 'I used to spend the long winter evenings before going to bed listening ... agape with ecstasy and terror as my parents read aloud from the novels of Ann Radcliffe.' This queen of Gothic mystery thrillers was Dostoevsky's memorable initiatrix to literature, and he never forgot the lessons he absorbed from her during those long winter evenings. His own novelistic technique, as Leonid Grossman pointed out long ago in a classic study, was modelled both on Ann Radcliffe and her successors, especially French ones, who catered to the popular taste for suspense, mystery and narrative surprise. Dostoevsky was the only Russian writer of his stature to employ these Gothic devices, and he was severely rapped over the knuckles for the 'vulgarity' of doing so (a sniffish and snobbish critical tradition that has been regrettably carried into our own day by Vladimir Nabokov). But Dostoevsky, who unlike his rivals wrote for a living, paid no attention to his detractors, and we should be grateful that he shrugged them off. For Demons is not only a novel that deals with some of the profoundest issues of the modern world, and indeed of human life - it is also a riveting page-turner, a great read, a thriller par excellence that is impossible to put down.

Joseph Frank

Joseph Frank is Professor Emeritus in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and Professor Emeritus in Slavic and Comparative Literature from Stanford University. He has just completed a highly acclaimed five-volume study of Dostoevsky's life and work. The second volume, Dostoevsky: The Years of Ordeal, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography in 1985.