Dostoyevsky’s “Demons”

My rediscovery of Dostoyevsky continues.

I first read this novel as a teenager, well over thirty years ago now, in David Magarshack’s translation. He had translated the title as The Devils (Ian Katz, whose translation is currently published by Oxford World Classics, also translates the title as The Devils), while the most recent translators, Robert Maguire (whose translation, published by Penguin Classics, I most recently read), and the husband-wife team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokonsky, prefer Demons. I do not know which is the more accurate, but I’d guess either to be closer to the original than The Possessed, the title chosen by the first translator, Constance Garnett: Dostoyevsky’s title refers, I believe, to those who are possessing rather than those who are possessed. And Demons is perhaps a better choice of title than The Devils, as it is more suggestive of supernatural possession.

It is supernatural possession that seems to me to be at the heart of this very strange novel. Of course, to describe this novel as “very strange” isn’t really saying much, as all Dostoyevsky novels can be described as “very strange”: they inhabit a curious world that is not quite this one – a world of grotesque comedy and of hysterical violence, both emotional and physical. One never knows from moment to moment which direction things will take, and I suspect Dostoyevsky was not always too sure himself. He once complained that he had always to write to deadlines, and didn’t have the luxury that Tolstoy or Turgenev had to plan things out beforehand; but even if he did, I don’t think he’d have written differently: he believed people had absolute freedom, and that were he to plan things out, he would be depriving his characters of that freedom. There is no predetermination in Dostoyevsky’s world: right till the very moment that a character does something, there is a possibility that the character may have done something else, or not have done anything at all. So, for instance, Shatov strikes Stavrogin in public, but there is no sense of inevitability about it: even as Shatov is walking up towards Stavrogin, he himself is not sure of what it is he will do. In the event, he delivers a blow; but equally well, he may not have done. And similarly, when Stavrogin receives the blow, there is no inevitability about his reaction: he may have hit back; he may even have killed Shatov on the spot; instead, he accepts the blow, and does nothing. In neither the action nor in the reaction is there any sense of inevitability: everything is inevitable only when it has already happened, and not before – not even a split second before.

To convey this sense of extreme volatility in which human actions can in no way be determined, Dostoyevsky relies, I think, on his improvisatory skills. These skills are remarkable, and often generate a sort of febrile intensity that I don’t think I have experienced from any other author. But it results also in weaknesses: the unpredictable can be tremendously exciting, but it can just as easily appear merely arbitrary, or inconsistent. I wasn’t, for instance, convinced by the sudden appearance of Shatov’s estranged wife some 700 pages into the novel merely to give birth to an illegitimate child. There had been nothing in the novel to lead up to this, and, more importantly, there had been nothing in the novel to make Shatov’s sudden sense of joy and of tenderness appear credible. How can we believe that a character who had, till then, shown not the slightest indication of love or of tenderness for anyone, can suddenly be so overjoyed and so gently solicitous for his estranged wife, and for a newborn baby not his own?

The novel can lose shape as well. Characters introduced in major roles can drop out of the novel, as Dostoyevsky’s attention is captured by other matters; and characters not adequately introduced can suddenly command centre stage. The first of the three parts of the novel, which reads more like a somewhat like a grotesque satirical comedy than anything else, depicts at great length two characters, Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina and Stefan Trofimovich Verkhovensky; but as soon as we enter the second part of the novel, these two virtually disappear from sight, to be replaced centre stage by their respective sons. The two elder characters only re-emerge towards the end, by which time most of the main action of the novel has already taken place. Or consider Varvara Petrovna’s son, Nikolay Vselodovich Stavrogin: when he appears, he is introduced as a principal character – virtually all other characters in the novel are connected to him in some way or other, and he seems to be at the centre of the various tangled webs. And yet, despite the novel developing into a furious hive of all sorts of activity, he appears never to play any kind of active role, remaining curiously aloof from it all. Meanwhile, Verkhovensky’s son, Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, who seems to emerge from out of nowhere some 250 pages into the novel, and with little preparation made for his entrance, assumes for the rest of the novel a major active role. Whatever explanations one may give for such things, such features remain, I think, flaws.

However, one must accept these things in Dostoyevsky: if his improvisatory style of writing is the source of such weaknesses, it is the source also of his considerable strengths. And amongst his many strengths is his ability to evoke terror.

There is certainly no shortage of terror in Demons.  Insofar as one can summarise a novel of such complexity in a few words, it is “about” the havoc wreaked upon a town by a group of revolutionaries, but that hardly tells us anything about the novel that is worth knowing. The political aspect of this novel is certainly worthy of serious study, but what struck me most forcibly was not so much the political polemic, but the sense of the demonic: the characters here really are possessed – and as the novel progresses, the demons of the title seem more than merely metaphorical. There are times when one says to oneself “but surely people don’t do things like that!” But Dostoyevsky, who had spent years in Siberian labour camps with some of the most depraved of criminals, knew better: people can do things like that, and they do.

One cannot quite write about the “centre of the novel”, as there appears to be no centre to it at all. We have an unnamed narrator, who is himself a wonderful piece of characterisation. But the narrative voice is not constant. There are times when we get only what the narrator knows, and, frequently, this is a case of “maybe…” and “perhaps…”, and “it seems as if…” Nothing is ever entirely clear, or entirely certain. But then suddenly, without warning, the narrative will lurch into scenes that the narrator could not have witnessed, or take us into the tortuous recesses of the minds of various characters, showing us things that the narrator could not possibly have known about. And every now and then, without warning, the narrators’s uncertain eye-witness account re-emerges. There is, quite deliberately, no consistency to the narrative: by the end of the novel, the whole world seems to explode, but there hasn’t been a centre to hold in the first place.

The strand about the revolutionaries, and their murder of a former member, is based on a real-life case, in which a group of revolutionaries, headed by a Sergei Nechaev, had similarly murdered one of their former members. The murder scene in the novel is as horrific as anything I think I have ever read – not merely because of what happens, but also because of the very different reactions of the murderers, ranging from cold unthinking obedience, to deep unease, right down to hysterical terror. Verkhovensky has convinced this little cell of five that the murder must be done to prevent the former member from informing on them: the real reason – insofar as any “real reason” can be disentangled from the mass of various contradictory aspects – is that he wanted to knit the group together by involving them in communal guilt. And perhaps the “real reason” goes even further than that: perhaps it is because Verkhovensky really craves evil for its own sake. Perhaps he really is possessed by demons. Not metaphorical demons, but real demons.

Stavrogin too seems haunted by demons. In a notorious chapter that the publisher refused to print (the book was written for serialisation, and Dostoyevsky was writing it even as it was being serialised), Stavrogin relates in a confession how he had raped a little girl, and had then stood by as the girl had hanged herself in despair. It is hard to imagine anything more evil than this, and many have regretted the omission of this powerful and disturbing chapter; but I personally feel that the novel is better without it. This chapter makes explicit too much that should merely be hinted at, and Dostoyevsky, knowing that this chapter would not be part of the novel, was compelled to characterise Stavrogin in a somewhat different and, I think, more subtle manner. (Robert Maguire gives us this chapter as an appendix rather than restore it into the main body of the text, and this seems a sensible thing to do. David Magarshack, and Pevear & Volokonsky, also present this chapter as an appendix.) And a picture emerges of a man who is not cheerfully amoral, as Verkhovensky is: indeed, he is capable even of noble emotions and actions. But he is addicted to evil simply because it is evil, and because he knows it to be evil: he has to see how far he can push himself in this direction: the ability to commit acts of unpardonable evil, of his own free will, seems to provide him simultaneously with a reason for living, and, eventually, a reason for not continuing to live. Faced with a character so monstrous, one is tempted once again to say “But people don’t do such things!” But Dostoyevsky, one suspects, knew better about such matters.

But what about the revolutionaries themselves? When I first read this novel as a teenager, I felt that Dostoyevsky had weakened his own case by constantly satirising them. No doubt the movement did attract psychopaths and fools and people who were genuinely evil, but given the monstrous social injustices of Tsarist Russia, is it inconceivable that it might also have attracted also genuinely well-meaning people, people who really were driven by a desire for much-needed change? We don’t see such people. At no point do the revolutionaries show any concern or compassion for the impoverished masses. Dostoyevsky’s picture of the revolutionaries seemed to me then, and seems to me now, a caricature of the revolutionary movement, but, knowing a bit more now about the history of Soviet Russia than I did then, and, more particularly, having read so recently of the sheer insanity of Soviet rule in the works of Vasily Grossman, Dostoyevsky’s critique of the revolutionaries, caricature though it may be, seems now more difficult to dismiss. Here, for instance, is Shigalyov expounding his ideas:

“I have become entangled in my own data, and my conclusion stands in direct contradiction to the initial idea from which I started. Proceeding from unlimited freedom, I end with unlimited despotism. I will add, however, that there can be no solution to the social formula except mine.”

And later:

“What I’m proposing is not something unconscionable but paradise, and there can be no other kind on earth,” Shigalyov concluded imperiously.

[From the translation by Robert Maguire]

This may seem insane, but it is precisely this insanity that prevailed on the largest scale imaginable. I doubt Dostoyevsky would have been particularly surprised by what eventually did turn out to be the case: the writings of Vasily Grossman seem but to record the fulfilment of Dostoyevsky’s prophecy.

And yet, what exactly was Dostoyevsky proposing instead? He was, we know, a devout believer, and a Slavophile, and yet when Shatov, who shares similar ideas, tries to give them expression, he comes out with pure gibberish: Dostoyevsky was too fine an artist to create merely a mouthpiece for his own ideology, but that does mean that Dostoyevsky’s own ideology becomes hard to discern from his work.

He certainly had no time for radicalism (which he characterises here in terms of demonic possession, no less), but he went further: he had no time either for liberalism, which he saw as essentially dilettantism, and a foolish accommodation of those who really are possessed. Is this entirely fair, I wonder? No doubt there were then, as now, foolish chatterers amongst the liberals, but there are always foolish chatterers everywhere, subscribing to all shades of political opinion: to pick on the foolish seems an unconvincing way to undermine the beliefs they profess, for what ideology is there that does not have foolish adherents?

In the notes to the Penguin edition, Ronald Meyer (who edited the volume and compiled the notes after the death of the translator Robert Maguire) quotes from a letter Dostoyevsky sent his niece:

“My dear, look after your education and don’t neglect even a profession … but you should know that the woman question, and especially that of the Russian woman, will definitely make several great and wonderful strides even within your own lifetime. I’m not speaking of our precocious ladies – you know how I view them”

So, quite clearly, Dostoyevsky, for all his strictures on the empty chatterers – “our precocious women” – approved of the “wonderful strides” being made in terms of sexual equality, and thought this a good thing. But how did he think these advances were being made? Would such “wonderful strides” be made at all if it weren’t for the liberals that he so despised?

But unfair though Dostoyevsky’s caricatures may be, it must be admitted that they are hilariously funny. Even when they are deeply sinister, as they frequently are, they do not stop being funny. The caricature of Turgenev – presented here as the “great novelist” Karmazinov – is deeply unfair and spiteful, but I must admit it had me laughing: Dostoyevsky was, amongst other things, a great comic writer.

But the comedy all too often slips into very dark, murky regions. As ever, he approaches the most profound questions concerning human existence without the slightest hint of embarrassment. He gets away with it because he had the extraordinary ability – an ability I have not come across in any other writer – of making ideas in themselves dramatic and exciting. His characters can become possessed not merely by demons, but also by ideas: indeed, sometimes it’s hard to differentiate between the two. Kirillov, for instance, is determined to shoot himself – not out of despair, but because, given what he believes, it is the only rational thing for him to do. In any other novel, this would seem merely absurd, but here, it is dramatic, and frightening, and very believable: Kirillov’s ideas have taken on dramatic shape, and, by the time he comes to do the deed, the tension generated is terrifying. No doubt, as with much else in this novel, the suicide scene too is improvised, but once read, it haunts the mind with a febrile intensity that’s hard to account for, and impossible to convey in any summary.

The impression the novel leaves in me – and which I remember even from my first reading some thirty-five years ago now – is one of sheer terror. There really is a demonic presence in these pages. In the later novel The Brothers Karamazov, the Devil makes a personal appearance, and we may, if we choose, interpret this appearance as merely the hallucination of a sick man; but a more literal interpretation is possible also. Here, there is no explicit appearance of supernatural phenomena, but it is easy to believe that the possession to which the title refers is real. For all its untidiness, for all its many flaws, this is a book that sears itself into the reader’s mind. And, despite thinking about little else since I finished reading this book a few weeks ago, I still am not quite sure why this should be so. Dostoyevsky remains for me a maddening author worth being maddened by.