Demons, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1872

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, especially due to a long and slow initial introductory section of about 300 pages. We learn that several of the characters have recently been in Switzerland and or far away in the Russian capital of Petersburg, but all of them return to the town at around the same time. 

The town’s most significant landowner is the widow Varvara Petrovna Stavrogin. While she is not the primary character, the plot nonetheless revolves around her circle of family and friends. Varvara has a non-romantic relationship with her son’s former tutor, Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, now passing middle age. He was an active intellectual in the Western-oriented liberal movements of the 1840s, but is in essence a flop who never amounted to much. Stepan had two failed marriages - both his wives also passed away - and abandoned a son in Central Europe. This son whom he did not raise, Pytor Stepanovich, by the time of the story now a young man, becomes a professional revolutionary.

Varvara’s son is Nikolai Vsevolodovich, an aloof but charismatic libertine and mischief-maker. He is an all-around talented and intelligent person, although he wastes his time drinking, sleeping on the streets, and playing the degenerate rather than pursuing a career. Through it all, Stavrogin repeatedly makes significant impressions on all his peers. Stavrogin’s depravities take place primarily in Petersburg, where he spends time with Pyotr Stepanovich and his crew. Stavrogin is said to have a reputation among the townspeople for being somewhat odd or even crazy. However, I felt that we are told about his charisma but not shown it, to the same degree.

Stavrogin conducts many affairs with women ranging in backgrounds and biographies, including several important characters. Nikolai had an affair with a noblewoman, Liza, daughter of his mother’s friend, while in Switzerland, as well as with Darya, his mother’s servant and sister to one of Pyotr’s former revolutionary disciples, Shatov. These affairs are the subject of many rumors in the town. 

Stavrogin’s behaviors gradually become more scandalous and salacious. It is later revealed that Stavrogin behaves this way to challenge and entertain himself - the baser, the better. He cavorts with noblewomen, with servant women, with a noblewoman and her servant simultaneously, and so on. To ruin himself and his prospects in the eyes of his social class, as a kind of sarcastic joke, Stavrogin marries a destitute, physically and mentally disabled woman, Marya Timofeevna, the sister of one of Pyotr’s most pathetic and drunkard friends, Lebyadkin. Marya and Lebyadkin receive a stipend from Nikolai and live in his hometown, and Nikolai plans to reveal this marriage later to maximum effect.

Worst of all among Stavrogin’s misdeeds, is his heinous crime against a young girl in Petersburg. In a chapter that was originally censored by the Russian publisher due to its content, Stavrogin admits in a confessional letter to a retired Bishop that while living in Petersburg, he sexually abused a young girl, the daughter of his landlords. He later stood by while she committed suicide out of shame. Stavrogin did this to reach the height of depravity, and indeed found himself extended beyond even his sick capacity for the enjoyment of the depraved.

Back in the town, we learn that Pytor has set up a small secret group of socialist revolutionaries and is plotting to cause chaos. Pytor claims to be connected with an international organization seeking to overthrow the government and institute a socialist order. The group consists of Shatov and a few others, notably including a thinker named Shigalyev. Shatov is a lapsed socialist who now professes a strong traditionalist and nationalist Slavophile ideology, making the rest of the secret society suspicious of Statov and fearing that he may contact the police.

Stavrogin made a major impression on Pyotr, who saw in Stavrogin exactly the kind of strong-willed, amoral figure who could lead a revolution. Pyotr tries repeatedly to convince Stavrogin to join his group more than just socially - I get the feeling that Stavrogin associates with this group primarily in keeping with his continual self-debasement - but Stavrogin refuses.

Pytor is an insistent and convincing figure, successful with everyone other than Stavrogin. Pyotr grows close with the wife of the new governor, Yulia Mikhaylovna, who is sympathetic to liberal causes. Pytor and Yulia establish a social circle of liberals that grows to include more and more disreputable members and convinces her to hold a major ball and reception. It appears that Pyotr plans to sabotage the event to delegitimize the governor. At the same time, political pamphlets have been spread around the area, especially among the nearby factory workers, most likely by Pyotr and his group.

While developing the political agitation and sabotage, Pytor has also prepared a fabricated alibi to protect himself and to irreversibly bind his revolutionary group to him and the cause. Shatov’s abandonment of the group’s ideology represents a threat and a convenient justification for his murder by the group which would form a kind of secrecy blood pact. The public cover for the murder would be provided by the actions of a separate figure whom Pytor has found, that of an associate of the group named Kirillov. Kirillov is an engineer who met Shatov during a trip abroad. Kirillov has a unique atheist philosophy which has not led him to pursue political revolution. Instead, he has independently decided to commit suicide to explore his philosophy to the fullest, by taking what he sees as the action that is freeest and closest to that of God, if God exists. Pytor has convinced Kirillov to wait for his instructions and to commit his act in such a way that maximally benefits Pyotr’s plan. Kirillov doesn’t know this beforehand, but Pytor wishes to implicate him for Shatov’s murder.

The ball held by Yulia is a disaster, but is followed by a much greater disaster - a large fire in one of the neighborhoods near the river. During the chaos, the governor proves totally incompetent and literally loses his mind. To make matters worse, Marya and her brother Lebyadkin are found murdered in one of the burnt houses. Nikolai’s marriage to Marya had been publicly revealed beforehand, and he is suspected in the murder. In fact, Pyotr had this murder arranged for the benefit of Nikolai who knew of the plan and did nothing to stop it. 

During the same night that the ball and fire occur, Stavrogin restarted his affair with the engaged Liza, the well known and respected noblewoman with whom Stavrogin had previously been involved. The outrage about the death of Marya reaches Liza, and she confronts Stavrogin who admits his partial complicity. Liza rushes to the crime scene and into a drunken crowd where she is struck and dies. Thus another life is ruined by association with Stavrogin. 

It becomes clear that the course of events has gone beyond the control of Pyotr and the revolutionary society, whose members begin to panic. They lure Shatov to the Stavrogin estate and kill him, and Pyotr convinces Kirillov to confess to the crime in his suicide note, which he writes before shooting himself. Despite the murder quickly being discovered, Pyotr is able to leave town before the society is uncovered. The other conspirators confess in quick succession due to overwhelming feelings of guilt.

Right after Darya and Varvara decide to go to Switzerland, Nikolai shows up abruptly at Skvoreshniki and sequesters himself in his portion of the house. After a short but frantic search by the family and their staff, they discover Nikolai dead, having just hung himself, leaving a note admitting feelings of guilt and shame.

Analysis of the plot

The plot is inspired by a real murder by a similar revolutionary circle which was a widely spread news story. The circle conspired to murder a former member who had renounced leftist politics in favor of Russian traditionalism. The murder was led by a revolutionary named Sergey Nachayev in Moscow in 1869 who later became infamous in Russia. Nachayev had an extensive career in Russia and Switzerland working as an anarchist and communist revolutionary and would later die imprisoned. His methods served as an explicit inspiration for later Russian revolutionaries like Lenin.

The characters in Demons are more political symbols than authentic personalities. Stavrogin seems to be a kind of uber-man described by Nietszhce and a Russian nihilist. However, unlike the uber-man and nihilist who creates his own morality, in the end Stavrogun cannot avoid his own guilty conscience and commits suicide. This is similar to Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. Shatov is a Slavophile who believes in the special connections between the Russian land, people, religion, and ruler. He seems to match most closely the feelings of the author himself. Shigalyev appears like a prophet for the real events of communism in Russia and in the 20th century. He shares his plan for what the revolutionary society should strive to accomplish - a despotic society with an enslaved supermajority controlled by a terror state. He estimates that a hundred million may die in the process. Stepan Verkhovensky is a pro-Western liberal of the 1840s, while Pyotr Verkhovensky is a Russian Nihilist of the 1860s.

Suicide plays a major role in the story, and there are several - by Stavrogin, his abuse victim, and Kirillov. The young woman and abuse victim does so to escape from the pain of the shame of a victim, while Stavrogin himself does it out of the shame of the guilty criminal. However, Kirillov’s suicide is ostensibly motivated on a more philosophical level by a desire to proclaim the ultimate expression of his will and independence, thus paradoxically confirming his life and existence. The course of Kirillov’s explanation progresses along religious and atheistic lines, circling around the question of the existence of God. Kirillov wants to commit suicide as a way to become like God, with power over life and death and to assert his total freedom.

Kirillov also discusses the apparent increasing prevalence of suicide in Russia at the time. I think Dostoevksy is concerned about suicide and its implications and relationship with religious and atheistic belief. In our own time in the US, there is an increasing suicide rate as well as drug overdose rate. Most contemporary discussion does not focus on the moral or religious dimensions of this problem but instead on practical dimensions like the material, social, and psychological suffering of those people. These are often called “deaths of despair.” After reading some of Dostoevsky’s thoughts on suicide, I wonder if today’s fight against suicide should include a larger focus on countering despair along broadly “spiritual” or “meaning”-based lines.

Demons does not stand out as an exceptional novel, structurally speaking. Its narrative clarity, pacing, and quality of its plot leave a lot to be desired. It was laborious to read at times, particularly during the first 200-300 pages. I later read online that this section is infamously and universally acknowledged as boring.

The most compelling part of the story was censored in the initial publication due to its provocative and disturbing content. Despite pushback and protest from the author, Dostevsky was forced by his publisher to remove the chapter At Tikhon’s and modify the rest of the manuscript for internal consistency. Without this chapter, the character of Nikolai Stavrogin is mysterious but somehow superfluous, and Pyotr’s admiration and ambitions for Nikolai seem to come out of left-field.

Continued Relevance of Demons

The book’s primary importance lies in the following areas:

1. Its impressive predictive accuracy regarding the later Russian Revolution and the spread of international communism;

2. Its place in Dostoevsky’s philosophical and psychological oeuvre regarding the questions of morality, atheism, nihilism, and crime, as well as the particular focus on political or ideological radicalism in this book, and the perpetually-relevant points that may possibly be drawn for our own time;

3. Its melding of the personal quirks and inner lives of the characters with the larger political issues, suggesting the links between them.

I have addressed the first and second points already, but let us discuss the third point. The personal and political plots are parallel and overlap. Both revolve on the personal relationships of Nikolai Stavrogin. The young men who either admire or disdain Nikolai and the women he has affairs with are the same set of characters who are involved in the political plots. It is not clear how easily political and personal motivations can be separated. Clearly Dostoevksy was highly skeptical of any high minded or abstract motivations for political and ideological movements. Instead, Dostoevksu wished to show that the figureheads of such movements are nothing more than flawed humans whose political objectives are motivated by personal ambitions and insecurities and by selfishness and pettiness.

Comparison between Doestoevksy’s nihilism and 2020s American leftism

In Demons, Russian nihilism is paired with socialism. “Russian nihilism” dispenses with notions of “good” and “evil" and favors ideas of “useful” and “useless”. There are several kinds of socialism described in the novel, including Fourierism. This was the work of a French thinker named Fourier who proposed that society would organize itself in communes known as “Phalansteries” wherein a collective economic and social life would dominate and individual households would not exist.

During the political discussions of Pyotr’s secret society, there are debates about Fourierism and other socialist topics. Earlier I mentioned how Shigalyev introduced a theory to the group, called Shigalyevism. I think Dostoevsky believes that the idealistic dream of harmonious phalansteries like in Fourierism will attract people to the socialist movements, but that nihilist leaders will exploit these people and implement a dictatorship along the lines of Shigalyev. To Dostoevsky, the true face of socialism is Shigalyevism, not Fourierism.

The American left of the 2020s features a highly dualistic ideology of good and evil. It summarizes history with a grand narrative wherein the forces of good oppose those of evil. These forces of evil are permanently and structurally advantaged over good, but good nonetheless makes progress during the course of history. Good corresponds to the oppressed seeking liberation, while evil corresponds to the oppressors. This schema is applied to a wide range of areas including race, gender, geopolitics, economics, environmentalism, and more.

Perhaps the major difference between the leftism of 21st century America and that of Dostoevsky’s time lies not in their goals of remaking the world but instead the nature of their opposition. Nihilist socialism had as its opponent an inseparable and cohesive edifice of Orthodox religion, Tsarist state authority, and feudal economic system. Political power, religious authority, and economic wealth were all exactly colocated in the persons of the nobility and clergy. Religious morality, state law, and economic practices were self-reinforcing and overlapping. The nihilists opposed this system of morality because it supported the entire social system which they wanted to replace. It was Dostoevksy’s belief that this system of morality was necessary for the continuation of the belief and practice of good, evil, and moral conscience. Dostoevksy likely would claim that the benefits of conscience justified the power hierarchy. Nihilists in contrast rejected the traditional concepts of good and evil as deceptions used to maintain the existing social hierarchy. Scientific concepts like usefulness and productivity would be embraced and used to destroy the old morality and create a new, prosperous social system. Turgenev’s nihilist character in Fathers and Sons most clearly states that there is no moral proposal from the nihilist and that destruction is sufficient. 

In today’s American progressivism, there is a strong system of morality that the movement seeks to institute as a replacement for the traditional system. The term “culture war” reflects this conflict between two systems of morality. In contrast to the society of Dostoevksy’s day, today’s society has a more diffuse system of morality. The ideologies of the domains of politics, religion, and the economy are more often distinct and in conflict, although there are many linkages between them. Today, traditional morality is less overwhelming in comparison to the situation of the 1860s-70s. This leaves an opportunity for an all-explaining ideology such as that proposed by today’s progressives and leftists. Ironically, I believe that the ideology in today’s America that seems most similar to that of the nihilists sits in the right in the form of anarcho-capitalism and Ayn Rand-style objectivism. The two ideologies emphasize individual freedom of action and deemphasize collective moral constraints on individuals.

Actual Impacts of Atheism vs Doestoevky’s Expectations

One thing that I kept considering while reading this book was whether Dostoevsky’s expectations for a post-traditional/religious society matched the reality of our contemporary situation. I think it makes sense to ask this question because the West is now largely secular and atheist. 

Dostoesky was overwhelmingly concerned with the nature of morality after Christianity. He saw that the primary challenger to religion in his time, Russian Nihilism, proposed the destruction of the combined 19th century Russian state/religion/economy and its replacement with an overall undefined scientific utilitarian individualistic system (to be determined after the initial destruction, should the movement succeed). 

Dostoevsky’s concern boils down to - if a person doesn’t believe in God/law/tradition, how can any action be seen as good/legal/right or evil/illegal/wrong other than by asking the question “will this help me achieve my goals?” Under that barometer, the argument goes, what is to stop that person from committing crime, even up to the point of murder? Doestoevsky believed that a post-religious world would be a post-moral world and, in his eyes, an evil world.

As described above, I actually believe that the modern left proposes a very strong system of moral good and evil that, while different in its focus, in many ways resembles traditional morality. In this way, Dostoevksy’s concerns seem to have been misplaced. What has been a much more substantial change is the rejection of traditional identity rather than traditional morality. This shows up in changes to gender roles, sexual preferences and identities, etc. I don’t think identity and these issues were on Dostoevsky’s mind much at all.

The result of this difference is that those who have rejected tradition tend to behave fairly similarly to those who have not, in terms of their morality, but may proclaim a wholly non-traditional identity definition for themselves. To me this seems to be an overall good outcome in comparison to what Dostoevsky imagined since it means that people behave morally and yet experience a profound level of self expression.

Concluding Thoughts

The novel begins with an epigraph from the Gospel of Luke, which describes an incident when Jesus exorcized a suffering demon-possessed man. The many demons ask to be allowed to possess a nearby herd of pigs, to which Jesus agrees. The demons possess the herd which immediately runs into a lake, drowning themselves, saving the man and scaring the rest of the people.

I believe Dostoevky’s main point in the novel is to show that the revolutionaries and their ideas are essentially destructive. We see this in the events in the town, but also in the philosophy of Shigalyev. The later Russian Revolution and other ideologies like Nazism brought massive destruction. I believe Dostoevly wished to warn about the risk of material and moral destruction that could come from new ideologies. He was a traditionalist and a Slavophile and believed that Orthodox Christianity provided a morality of good and evil that enabled a functioning society.

A lesson that could be abstracted and simplified from Dostoevsky’s point - the idea of good and evil described in tradition and religion is not something to be taken for granted. As shown repeatedly throughout history, it is very difficult for humans, both individually and collectively, on large and small scales, to do good rather than evil. While traditional moralities don’t fully achieve this, perhaps we should consider if a newly proposed morality will achieve this better or worse than what we already see.