Demons (1872)

Part 1

Dostoevsky’s Demons is such a complex novel that it can be read many different ways.  This time reading it, I was struck by a similarity it shares with his previous masterpieces: Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, and The Idiot.  All of these books are preoccupied with the question, can people change?

In Notes from Underground, the Underground Man has an intense desire to be good, but is blocked by his own hangups.  Liza offers him a new life, but he is unable to take it.  In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov vascilates between wanting to lovingly connect with others and wanting to separate to become a superman.  Sonya helps him undergo the humility of surrender.  In The Idiot, Nastasya Fillipovna struggles between spiteful self-destruction to revenge herself against her oppressors and the willingness to accept love.  Myshkin desires to help her toward love, but the act of renouncing her pride proves too much for herself and she throws herself into the power of her murderer.  Though Myshkin’s project seemingly fails, the seeds of goodness he planted spring up in unexpected places.  

In all of these, a character is suspended between good and evil.  Some characters are wooing them toward the good, others toward the evil.  

Demons is much the same.  Stavrogin has done horrible things and is tormented by his past.  Over the course of the novel, two paths are offered to him and he is unsure which to take.  

The first path is presented by him primarily through Pyotr Stepanovich.  He aspires to make Stavrogin into a leader of a political movement.  The movement seems to have begun from an honest desire to bring greater equality into their country.  The thinkers of this movement are convinced that the only way to bring about this new, just society is to topple the current order.  This use of destruction as a means to an end has a strange effect on Pyotr Stepanovich.  He and his followers find themselves enamored with destruction and start to revel in breaking anything considered honorable in the old order—everything from putting pornography into Bibles to sneaking food off the plate of a boy who just killed himself to celebrating cheating spouses and womanizers to talking rudely to authority figures.  This fervor leads them to senslessly burn down a village.  

This strange intoxication that can come from embracing destruction is best articulated by the narrator’s description of the experience of watching a dangerous fire.  It produces in the spectator “a sort of brain concussion and a challenge, as it were to his own destructive instincts . . . this gloomy sensation is almost always intoxicating.”  Stepan Trofimovich adds, “I really do not know whether it is possible to watch a fire without a certain pleasure.”

And once destruction for the noble cause is underway, Pyotr Stepanovich can’t resist the temptation to use it to settle petty personal scores.  The political group’s activities culminate in the murder of Shatov, whom there was no real reason to murder except that Pyotr Stepanovich had a grudge.  

The second path is presented to Stavrogin at different times by Shatov, Kirillov, Dasha, and (in a chapter that was suppressed) Tikhon.  He is intensly interested in this path for much of the novel because through it he hopes to find relief from his demon (a regular hallucination he has of a young girl he had sexually assaulted and who, as a result, had hung herself).  

He tries to make amends to Gaganov, a man he offended, by accepting his challenge to a duel and letting Gaganov shoot at him while Stavrogin, on his turn, intentionally misses.  This only aggrivates Gaganov further.  After the duel, Stavrogin tells Kirillov “I did all I could.”  Kirillov disagrees.

“What should I have done?”

“Not challenge him.”

Take another slap in the face?”

“Yes, take a slap.”

Here Stavrogin starts to see what will be required of him to change.  He hopes to change simply through a show of willpower—a quality he has in abundance.  But what is required costs him more: humiliation.

In the suppressed chapter, Stavrogin hopes to free himself by authoring a grandiose, public confession.  Tikhon tells him that path won’t lead to freedom because he will still be able to maintain his pride.  Tikhon suggests that the only path to freedom for Stavrogin to accept ridicule.  It’s significant here that the name Stavrogin comes from the Russian word for “cross.”  The only way forward for Stavrogin is the way of the mocking purple robe and the crown of thorns.  

This is exactly what Stavrogin is unwilling to do.  He can endure anything but laughter.  Tikhon suggests that Stavrogin is like his mother, Varvara Petrovna.  The narrator wonders if “the demon of the most arrogant pride took possession of [her] precisely when she had the slightest suspicion that she was for some reason considered humiliated.”  She rejects her lifelong love out of pride.  Stavrogin, too, rejects this path out of pride, and this decision leads to the death of his wife, Marya, and her brother; of the woman he loves, Liza; of two of his greatest friends, Kirillov and Shatov; and of himself, through suicide.

And yet, even though this novel ends with the death of so many, the effect of the story isn’t one simply of pessimistic horror.  The glimmer of hope can be seen in one of the novel’s epigraphs, taken from the eighth chapter of Luke’s gospel:

“Now a large herd of swine was feeding there on the hillside; and they begged him to let them enter these.  So he gave them leave.  Then the demons came out of the man and entered the swine, and. the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned.  

“When the herdsmen saw what had happened, they fled, and told it in the city and in the country.  Then people went out to see what had happened, and they came to Jesus, and found the man from whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind; and they were afraid.  And those who had seen it told them how he who had been possessed with demons was healed.”

Toward the end of the book, Stepan Trofimovich connects this story to the events of the novel.  And this is echoed in the conclusion, where so many of the characters (Shatov, Kirillov, Stavrogin, and several others, including Stepan Trofimovich himself) seem to run away and destroy themselves.  In other words, many of the novel’s characters are parallel to the swine in the gospel.  

But this begs the question—if these characters are the swine, then who is the man that is now free from the demons? The village itself, which, throughout the novel, is always getting the events wrong with its inability to nuance, has parallels to the freed man, when, in the conclusion, they “rested, relaxed, recovered” after the chaos is over.  

And, interestingly, two of the “swine,” though they both die, also seem to undergo healing.  One is Shatov.  When his wife unexpectedly returns and promptly gives birth to another man’s child, goodness bursts upon him.  He sells his revolver and is consumed with generosity and joy.  He is overcome with love for his wife and for the great mystery of a new being coming into the world, even when it is greeted with cursing and blasphemy.  

The other is Stepan Trofimovich.  He confesses his love for Varvara Petrovna, he renounces his sponging off of her, and he undergoes an (albeit absurd and ambiguous) conversion.  

What these three—the village, Shatov, and Stepan Trofimovich—all have in common is that they are all ridiculous.  They are the clowns of the book.  Shatov’s hair always sticks up in the back, which keeps us from ever totally taking him seriously.  Stepan Trofimovich is a soppy goof from start to finish, and the public opinion of the village is a running joke.  But in this novel, humiliation is the path to the freedom of humility.