Tag Archives: demons

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!”  AnotherContinue reading

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 peopleContinue reading

The Notebooks for The Possessed (1869-1872) More than any of Dostoevsky’s previous writings, the Notebooks for The Possessed show his exploration of political ideas.  He seems to have set out to try to demonstrate the problems of the social utopianist beliefs of many of the leading Russian intellectuals at the time, (people like Chernechevsy, whoContinue reading