Demons

Subtract and see. Take out Stepan Trofimovich’s long introduction and the book loses its thesis, that the liberal idealists of the 1840s fathered the nihilists of the 1860s: Pyotr is his son by blood, and the whole circle is his by descent. Take out the fête of Part Three and the town’s collapse has no stage; take out Marie’s return and the birth, and Shatov’s murder loses its weight. The spine passes. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is that the plan changed in the writing, from a pamphlet against Nechaevism to a tragedy centred on Stavrogin, and it shows. Much of Part One’s comedy runs longer than the argument needs; Karmazinov’s reading at the fête is a settling of scores with Turgenev, carried at length; the meeting “with our people” and Lebyadkin’s verses repeat their points; and with “At Tikhon’s” withdrawn, parts of Part Two point at a centre the published book does not hold.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A revolutionary cell needs a crime to bind it: Pyotr has Shatov killed so that the five are tied by blood, not belief. A doctrine of total freedom arrives by its own logic at total despotism, and Shigalyov says so in one sentence: “Выходя из безграничной свободы, я заключаю безграничным деспотизмом”
(Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism). The disorder of a town is made not by the conspirators’ strength but by the vanity and fashion of the authorities and the educated, who flirt with the young to seem modern. And in Stavrogin the book discloses a will with nothing it wants, able to do anything and to believe nothing, around which everyone else’s ideas are organised. It holds without Dostoevsky’s faith. Held off the top because the satire caricatures as often as it discloses: Liputin, Lyamshin and Virginsky are at times the puppets of a pamphlet.

Score: 9.2 / 10

Height is reached often, and in Part Three almost continuously, in the dreadful register more than the warm. The dreadful: Kirillov’s last night with Pyotr waiting, the candle, the figure standing motionless in the corner, and the shot; the fire across the river and the bodies of the Lebyadkins; Liza killed by the crowd at the fire; Shatov’s murder in the park by the pond, with Erkel’s calm. The warm: Shatov and Marie through the night of the birth, where the narrator’s gossip falls silent; and Stepan Trofimovich’s last wandering on the high road with the Gospel-seller, his asking her to read the Gadarene passage, and his death in a peasant hut. Held a step below the top because Part One rises only in flashes, Shatov’s blow and Marya Timofeevna in Varvara Petrovna’s drawing room, while its comic register holds long.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Myth built, not evoked. The two epigraphs are the plan: Pushkin’s travellers circled by a demon in a blizzard, and the demons of Luke that leave a man and enter the swine, which rush into the lake and are drowned while the man sits clothed and in his right mind at Jesus’ feet. The book enacts both: ideas enter persons and drive them in circles, and the possessed run to their deaths while the town survives. At the end Stepan Trofimovich hears the passage read and himself names Russia as the sick man, and himself and his son as the swine. Around it the archetypes bear load: the Pretender, in Pyotr’s plan to set Stavrogin up as “Иван-Царевич”
(Ivan the Tsarevich), the hidden true ruler of the folk; Kirillov’s man-god; the holy fool and earth-mother in Marya Timofeevna. Held off the very top because the pamphlet’s figures do not share in it.

Score: 9.2 / 10

The inheritance is the anti-nihilist novel of the 1860s, a tendentious genre (Pisemsky, Leskov’s No Way Out), and the chronicle of provincial life. The swerve is to turn the political novel into metaphysical tragedy: a conspiracy plot whose real subject is what happens to persons when an idea possesses them, told by a gossiping narrator who cannot keep up with his own material, around a hero who is a void at the centre of every other character’s devotion. Kirillov’s suicide as a logical proof, carried through as a scene of horror, has no clear precedent. The stake was real: the book cost Dostoevsky with the progressive press for decades and fixed his name as a reactionary’s, and the confession chapter he thought central was refused and lost to the published book. Held below the top because the form of the anti-nihilist novel still governs much of the satire.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The chronicler is the instrument: a man of the town, half-implicated, who sets rumour and his own guesses beside what he saw, so that the reader knows the town as it knew itself, a place where everyone talks and no one knows. Possession by ideas is shown as contagion, and the narrator’s talk is a vector of it. The scandal scene, the whole cast brought into one room until the room explodes, in Varvara Petrovna’s drawing room in Part One and at the fête in Part Three, is the form by which a society is shown losing its law. Charged: the narrator’s knowledge is inconsistent, since he reports private scenes, Kirillov’s death and Stavrogin’s nights, that he could not have seen, and the book shifts to an omniscient register when it needs one; and the withdrawal of “At Tikhon’s” leaves the centre the form is built to circle emptier than the design intended.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Evidence rather than promise. A century and a half of reading has not exhausted it, and each political age has reread it: as a prophecy of Bolshevism by the émigré thinkers; as an anatomy of terror in Camus’s stage adaptation, Les Possédés (1959); as the chief exhibit of Bakhtin’s polyphonic novel (1929 and 1963); as a study of mimetic desire around Stavrogin in Girard. The text holds its questions open. Is Stavrogin a demon, a sick man, or a saint who failed? Does Kirillov’s suicide refute his idea or complete it? Is Shatov’s Russian God faith, or nationalism wearing faith? Is Stepan Trofimovich’s turn at the last grace, or one more pose? The form yields too: the narrator’s reliability is a field of study in itself.

Score: 9.2 / 10

The field is the Russian novel of the 1870s and, as Russian fiction entered it, the European. The force: the book made the political novel a vehicle of metaphysics, showed that terrorism and conspiracy could be the matter of tragedy rather than of melodrama or tract, and gave the novel of ideas the figure of the idea that possesses its holder. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it stands at the head of the twentieth century’s novel of revolution and terror, which answered it in agreement or against it, in Conrad’s Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent, Bely’s Petersburg, Camus’s The Just Assassins and his adaptation, and the political fiction after the Russian Revolution that read it as the book which had seen it coming. Held below the top because the larger reorganisation of Dostoevsky’s novel was made in Crime and Punishment and The Idiot before it and The Brothers Karamazov after; this book applies that form to politics.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Survival over about a hundred and fifty years, weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: the text survives whole as published in 1873. The confession chapter survives too, printed in most modern editions as an appendix; its withdrawal belongs to the history of the work, not to its loss. Presence is wide and continuous in the West: translated into the major languages, taught, staged by Camus in 1959, filmed by Wajda as Les Possédés in 1988, and reread at every political crisis. What holds it off the widest figure is its presence in its own language, which is reported, though not verified here, to have been interrupted for much of the Soviet century. Fabric: the surfaces, Turgenev parodied and the student circles of 1869, are period, but the book is read for what they pressed upon.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on the Russian as far as a close translation carries it. The command of the scene is the highest of its kind: the drawing-room scandal of Part One, timed so that Marya Timofeevna, Lebyadkin, Stavrogin, Shatov and Dasha arrive in sequence and the blow lands last; Kirillov and Pyotr in the dark room; the night of the birth; the murder in the park, each of the five acting by his nature. The voices are distinct and comic: Lebyadkin’s verses, Stepan Trofimovich’s French, Karmazinov’s preciosity. Charged: the prose is hurried, as Dostoevsky’s often is under serial deadlines, with repetition and loose syntax; the narrator’s frame is managed carelessly; the minor conspirators are thinly drawn; and some chapters of Part Two carry exposition the book could have dramatised. A making that bears the load in its scenes and is loose between them.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Stepan Trofimovich’s vanity over a lost manuscript and a teacup in Part One, and Kirillov’s suicide in Part Three. One law governs them: persons possessed by ideas they did not make, circling, the father’s harmless aestheticism and the man-god’s logic two ends of the same descent. The comic and the tragic obey it, as the epigraphs say they must, and the last chapter brings Stepan Trofimovich back to read the law aloud. Charged: the change of plan leaves a seam between pamphlet and tragedy, so that some conspirators are satirised under one law and Stavrogin and Kirillov tragedised under another; Karmazinov is a caricature drawn from outside the book’s world; and the narrator’s knowledge breaks its own rule. The range held is very wide; the hold is not seamless.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Held, not listed. Consciousness: Stavrogin’s emptiness, Kirillov’s logic, Shatov’s faith, Stepan Trofimovich’s lifelong pose and its breaking. The family: a mother and her son, Varvara Petrovna and Nikolai; a father and his son, Stepan and Pyotr; the Shatov marriage, with a child born and orphaned in a night. The state: the governor and his wife, the administration, the police, the province. History: two generations of the Russian intelligentsia, the 1840s and the 1860s, made agents of the plot. The sacred: Tikhon, withdrawn but present in Part Two’s references, the Gospel-seller, Kirillov’s man-god, Shatov’s people-God, the holy fool. Labour enters thinly, through the unrest of the Shpigulin factory workers, and the natural order more thinly still: those two counts hold it below the top.

Score: 9.1 / 10