Demons (Penguin Classics)

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Praskovya arrives, accompanied by her nephew Mavriky Nikolaevich, demanding to know why her daughter has been dragged in to Varvara Petrovna's "scandal". Dostoevsky's nihilists are portrayed in their ordinary human weakness, drawn into the world of destructive ideas through vanity, naïveté, idealism, and the susceptibility of youth. Despite the apparent grandiosity of the idea, Kirillov is a reclusive, deeply humble, almost selfless person who has become obsessed with making himself a sacrifice for the greater good of humanity.

The mysterious aristocratic figure of Nikolai Stavrogin—Verkhovensky's counterpart in the moral sphere—dominates the book, exercising an extraordinary influence over the hearts and minds of almost all the other characters. A common criticism of Demons, particularly from Dostoevsky's liberal and radical contemporaries, is that it is exaggerated and unrealistic, a result of the author's over-active imagination and excessive interest in the psycho-pathological.

He travelled abroad as a tutor with a merchant's family, but the employment came to an end when he married the family's governess who had been dismissed for 'freethinking'. Julia Mikhaylovna, who has somehow managed to reconcile Andrey Antonovich, is at the summit of her ambition. He also warns Shatov, who is a former member but now bitter enemy of Pyotr Verkhovensky's revolutionary society, that Verkhovensky might be planning to murder him.

Dostoevsky seeks to show how the Russian intellectuals of the first half of the century, with their delegitimisation of Russian culture, history and traditions in favour of Western ideas, paved the way for the nihilistic horrors that would be perpetrated by the following generations. For von Lembke, it is the duty of people like him, who are in a position of authority, to encourage the young radicals to condemn everything that is backward in the old Russia, but stop them from going too far. The downtrodden, crippled and half mad Marya had fallen hopelessly in love with him and he had responded by treating her "like a marquise". A particularly nice touch is how Pyotr Stepanovich boasts that he has tricked his subordinates into thinking that they are part of a wider organisation with branches all across Russia, affiliated to the Internationale (no doubt based on Marx’s own, which was reaching its end just as Dostoevsky was writing).

Stavrogin remains cold, but does not actually say no, and Pyotr Stepanovich persists with his schemes. Whilst I admire his powerful psychological portrait of the Russian revolutionary tradition, and his biting criticisms of said tradition and where it was heading, I can’t go along with his broader, more reactionary agenda – to rehabilitate Tsarism, Orthodox Christianity and Russian imperialism. The speech amounts to a declaration of love, reaching a climax with the exclamation "Stavrogin, you're beautiful! He was exiled for ten years between 1850 and 1859, four of those spent in a Siberian labour camp, after being arrested for taking part in a literary circle that discussed revolutionary ideas.