Nathan Bick

Introduction Demons is about a small provincial town in Russia in the late 1860s or early 1870s. The unnamed town experiences a buildup of conspiracy and suspicion, motivated by the works of a small group of men, until there is an explosion of violent chaos.  As I’ll describe later, the novel’s simple but archetypal plot of revolution is inextricably linked with and expressed through the biographies and squabbles of the characters involved. This will show the reader both that the political and ideological events can be boiled down to personal ambitions and emotions, and also that people can themselves sometimes be boiled down to the ideas which they represent.  Rather than go through a chronological play-by-play of the story’s plot, I primarily describe things character-by-character. Plot and Character Summary The reader learns about the situation in the town only piece-meal and we never in fact learn the name of the town itself. This mysterious backstory is often confusing, e...