Demons (1872)

Part 2

Dostoevsky’s novel Demons escalates to its catastrophe when a group’s cherished political opinions lead them to murder an innocent man.  Soon after the gun fires, one of them, Virginsky, loses his mind and starts screaming, “This is not it, this is not it!  No, this is not it at all!”  Another of them, Pyotr Stepanovich, observes Virginsky’s breakdown and says, “I had quite a different idea of him.”

The tragedy of this story is set in motion by a terrible gap between ideas and lived reality, between speech and soul.  One would think that such a concept wouldn’t make for a successful novel.  After all, a novel is nothing but speech.  But this novel has the uncanny ability to live beyond mere words.  Here’s how it achieves this:

1.  Minimal Commentary

We get very little interpretation about characters’ thoughts and feelings, and when we do, we get it only from other characters—even the narrator is only another character in this book.    This withholding style, on its own, would only make for confusion and coldness.  Dostoevsky balances it, however, with intentional arrangement of the events.  

For example, when Stavrogin leaves his house in the middle of rainy night on a mysterious errand, his servant, Alexei Yegorych, says, “God bless you, sir, but only setting out upon good deeds.”  This statement startles Stavrogin, and he asks Alexi Yegorych to repeat it, which he does.  The statement, the startle, and the repetition all create a point of emphasis.  I sense that Dostoevsky, by bringing so much attention to this line, wants me to bear it in mind.  And so, as Stavrogin sets out into the night, I’m wondering, “is Stavrogin out to do good deeds or bad?”  The emphasis creates a frame for me to interpret his ensuing scenes.  Thus Dostoevsky guides me through a coherent, powerful narrative without ever directly intruding on the mystery of Stavrogin’s being.

2.  Subtext-heavy Dialogue

I’ve never read a book that makes more artful use of subtext than this one.  Hardly ever does a character directly say what they mean.  Even their lies have layers.  When a group of people almost learn about Stavrogin’s secret marriage, Pyotr Stepanovich covers up for him, but intentionally sloppily, because he wants them to wonder if he’s lying.  But across the novel, the disparity between saying and meaning isn’t because every character is unrealistically obessessed with lying.  It’s a demonstration of the truth we all experience.  None of us can fully say what we mean because of the gap between speech and soul.  Thus Dostoevsky is able to use subtext to show the layered nature of a human being, which brings out the beauty of people even when they’re behaving in irritable, absurd, or cruel ways.

When I tell someone what this novel is about, it sounds as though the book is full of horrible people.  But when I get that response, I immediately think, no, it’s full of dear people.  There’s a sort of preciousness to most of the characters.  I care about them, even as they do some of the worst things people can do.  A good example of this is Marie Shatov.  She’s never anything but irritable and rude to her husband, but because of little hints, I know that is not it.  It’s not it at all!

These two techniques allow Dostoevsky to show respect for the mystery of being and to make space for subtleties of experience.  With this approach, characters can do what the character Kirillov calls “feeling thoughts.”  He describes people as having many thoughts with them all the time, but then suddenly, they’ll be able to feel a thought in a new way.  The thought itself isn’t new to the person, only the feeling of it.  This depiction of the stream of consciousness seems much more true to life than the sentence-transcription we’re used to getting from novels.

This approach also makes possible another unique aspect of Dostoevsky’s fiction.  His appeal is paradoxically wide.  His work is beloved by atheists and theologians, by easterners and westerners, by conservatives and progressives.  The space he makes for his characters also makes space for the readers.  This allows his novels to function as a meeting place between different worldviews.

This is an important skill for a novelist.  An author must present the novel’s world truthfully, but not with such certainty that no reader can access it unless they possess identical, idiosyncratic opinions to the writer.  A novel is a shared experience, and for it to be so, it must be a meeting place between the perspective of the author and the perspective of the reader.  It must resist the temptation of pet interpretations to reach for shared experience.