schroeder360's Full Review: Fyodor Dostoevsky and Richard Pevear - Demons: A N...
So far, I've read "Crime and Punishment" and "The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. While perusing his general section in the bookstore, I settled on "The Devils" (aka "The Demons" and "The Possessed") as my next Dostoyevskyan literary feat. The novel begins slowly, painfully slowly in fact, but by the end, I was sorry to have to finally put it down.
The novel, in very general terms, is about socialist radicals who are attempting to create social chaos as a beginning to installing in Russia a new social order. There are three central characters, in terms of the way I see it, each of whom represents starkly different ideas (very characteristic of Dostoyevsky). Stepan Tromifovich is the old, liberal Russian intellectual who is very much against the incoming nihilists and whose speech, affected with almost annoying French, places him with the older generation. Nikolai Vsevolodovich is the son of a wealthy, widowed landowner who finds amusement in doing the most base things he can imagine. His proclivity to boredom causes him to constantly seek new forms of entertainment, be it drinking, gambling, and debauchery, or raping (or possibly seducing, that's for you to decide) a young girl and allowing her to kill herself, or marrying a lame, nearly mad woman just for the fun of it; nothing is beyond him it would seem. Lastly is Peter Stepanovich, who is the radicals' ring leader and at the foregrounds of all radical activity in the town of the novel. He is also the son of Stepan Tromifovich, and is practically in love with Nikolai Vsevolodovich and has great plans for him in "the cause".
What occurs in the novel is the gradual decline in influence of the previously popular and influential Stepan Trofimovich and the almost meteoric rise of the two young men. At the end, what is significant is who survives of these three, who doesn't, and their general state at the time of their demise. This tells quite a bit of what Dostoyevsky is intending to mean in this work.
Part of the reason that the book drags for so long is that the shroud of mystery around many of the characters and their involvement or lack-thereof in certain questionable groups leaves the reader in the dark for too long. Not that all of that paper is wasted by the author--he expertly uses it to develop characters and the setting. But from a reading enjoyment point of view, the first three to four hundred pages are pretty boring, to put it simply.
One of the most interesting parts of the book, in my opinion, is the character Kirillov. He believes that the fear of death is the fear in the pain of death, and God is this fear. If he can kill himself without any fear, without even a reason to kill himself, then he himself will become God. At one point, he says to one of the other characters:
"I'm obliged to declare my unbelief... There's no idea greater than the fact that God doesn't exist. Human history supports me. The only thing man has done is to keep inventing God to go on living and not kill himself; this alone constitutes global history up to now. During the entire course of global history I alone am the first person who doesn't want to invent God. Let everyone know this once and for all."
I couldn't wait to see if he did kill himself, and if he did, what happened. I'll let you read the book and find out for yourself.
Overall, I enjoyed this book. However, it is not at the level of the other two novels by this author I mentioned above. If you haven't read at least one of those two already, then I do not suggest reading "The Devils", but one of the others.
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