Demons (Penguin Classics)

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I’d also disagree with Lindsay that, when the great passages come, they turn the previous ones into gold. With Devils, I seriously wonder if the bulk of the book really adds much to the bits I most enjoyed (the nihilist/anarchist bits). But that’s not to say it’s without any effect. The main cast of nihilist/anarchists don’t turn up until the end of part one of this three-part novel, but when they do, Dostoevsky’s narrator has had the chance to build them up with rumours and anecdotes, meaning they come loaded with a sort of star quality that instantly sets them apart. When they finally appear, it feels like things are getting underway at last. (And they do — for a bit.)

For the male characters, it means a competition in a lethal show-down in the manner of Macbeth’s last scenes. Who has the greatest soul, who dies in the most visibly dramatic way? Curtain falls on the suffering women, who unfortunately have nothing to gain from that “virtue”. For “a woman is always a woman, even if she is a nun”. And that means she commits the crime of being lukewarm. Let’s spit her out!Varvara Petrovna, insulted by too obvious desire of Stepan Trofimovich to marry and his too frank letter to his son Peter complaining that they want him to marry "in the sins of others", assigns a pension, but at the same time announces about breaking up.

point of it. There’s something about some sort of ‘sins in Switzerland.’‘I’m getting married,’ he says, ‘for my sins or on account of the ‘sins’ The best chapter in the novel has to be the meeting that occurs at about the halfway point, where a group of radical thinkers and students get together to discuss how society must be reformed. Things fall apart from the start, with no one understanding the voting process by which to decide who gets to speak. Then one man, Shigalyov, stands up and says he will deliver a series of lectures (twelve in all) outlining his solution to all social problems. It is, he insists, the only solution. However: When in Petersburg Stavrogin had secretly married the mentally and physically disabled Marya Lebyadkina. He shows signs of caring for her, but ultimately becomes complicit in her murder. The extent to which he himself is responsible for the murder is unclear, but he is aware that it is being plotted and does nothing to prevent it. In a letter to Darya Pavlovna near the end of the novel, he affirms that he is guilty in his own conscience for the death of his wife. [32]So, if it’s not merely about the nihilist/anarchist story, what is Devils about? It seems Dostoevsky wanted to write about two generations, and the effect that radical thinking has on both. The nihilist/anarchists are the second generation, the grown-up children of the earlier generation who start the novel, and whose story forms the bulk of the book. This first generation — including the parents of that second generation, though parents who haven’t done much, if any, actual parenting — are a set of wealthy, cultured, small-town nobility, officials, intellectuals and the like, who think of themselves as being fashionably radical. They’re typified by Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, a man who sees himself primarily as a radical writer, to the extent that when there’s an outbreak of radicalism in the country, he panics and writes to the authorities to assure them he had nothing to do with it. He has, in fact, written very little — he made his living as a private tutor, and has since been supported by his patroness and former employer, Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina, who provides him with living quarters, an income, and regularly pays off his gambling debts. The likelihood is that, when he writes to the authorities, they wonder who this nobody is. We get very little of Stepan’s actual ideas in the book — though I suspect there’s a lot of cultural context I’m not so much aware of, such as how radical his professed atheism is — but I’m assuming he (in his role as tutor rather than writer) is one of the main ways in which these ideas got passed to the next generation.

Julia Mikhaylovna von Lembke is the Governor's wife. Her vanity and liberal ambition are exploited by Pyotr Stepanovich for his revolutionary aims. The conspirators succeed in transforming her Literary Fête for the benefit of poor governesses into a scandalous farce. Dostoevsky's depiction of the relationship between Pyotr Stepanovich and Julia Mikhaylovna had its origins in a passage from Nechayev's Catechism where revolutionaries are instructed to consort with liberals "on the basis of their own program, pretending to follow them blindly" but with the purpose of compromising them so that they can be "used to provoke disturbances." [35] Dostoyevsky is writing the gospels man *. Greatness is not a bolus of achievement or a gout of acclaim. It just is. Each of Dostoyevsky's big novels is a piece that is both infinitely frustrating and beautifully perfect at the same time. There was probably more to love (for me) in Brothers Karamazov, but it didn't flow as easily as Demons, but still gah, still I think I love Demons more. No, Brothers K. No. Gah!Dostoevsky, Fyodor (2009). A Writer's Diary. Edited and with an introduction by Gary Saul Morson. Translated by Kenneth Lantz. Northwestern University Press. p.65. ISBN 9780810125216.

something.…‘On the Way’ or ‘Away!’ or ‘At the Parting of the Ways’—something of the sort; I don’t remember. The novel is in three parts. There are two epigraphs, the first from Pushkin's poem "Demons" and the second from Luke 8:32–36. I think of Demons/Devils/Possessed and BK as offering the two possibilities for Russia then, with BK offering the hopeful alternative, centered in Alyosha and the lads; and Demons showing the other (with the burning of the village).The final suicide is that of the little girl Matryosha, described by Stavrogin in his confessional letter. After her encounter with Stavrogin, she tells her mother that she has "killed God". When she hangs herself Stavrogin is present in the next room and aware of what she is doing. In a letter to his friend Apollon Maykov, Dostoevsky alludes to the episode of the Exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac in the Gospel of Luke as the inspiration for the title: "Exactly the same thing happened in our country: the devils went out of the Russian man and entered into a herd of swine... These are drowned or will be drowned, and the healed man, from whom the devils have departed, sits at the feet of Jesus." [9] Part of the passage is used as an epigraph, and Dostoevsky's thoughts on its relevance to Russia are given voice by Stepan Verkhovensky on his deathbed near the end of the novel. Dostoevsky saw Russia's growing suicide rate as a symptom of the decline of religious faith and the concomitant disintegration of social institutions like the family. [66] Self-destruction as a result of atheism or loss of faith is a major theme in Demons and further recalls the metaphor of the demon-possessed swine in the epigraph. [67] it was all so honourable. Suppose that something really happened … en Suisse… or was beginning. I was bound to question their hearts