Demons is a novel of frantic self-destruction at the level of an entire town. The consuming tragedy that seizes the populace results in the deaths of nine (!) major characters, and yet it is impossible to precisely locate the blame. In fact there is no innocence here, nor any place outside of the corrosive madness that has descended. Dostoevsky's novel is a portrait of this diffuse culpability and the inner corruption of the spirit that could explode into so much terror.
In one sense, Demons is Dostoevsky's most "political" novel, in that it depicts the extremes of Russian ideological currents coming into contact, relentlessly criticizing each other, and emitting in terroristic violence fomented by a radical cell. On another level, it is a picture of a generational divide, like Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. The "fathers," the Romantic, Westernized, and "literary" dissidents, cannot recognize their ideals in the crude, dogmatic ravings of their militant sons.
"It's our same idea, precisely ours; we, we were the first to plant it, to nurture it, to prepare it--and what new could they say on their own after us! But, God, how it's all perverted, distorted, mutilated! ... Are these the conclusions we strove for? Who can recognize the initial thought here?"
This picture of revulsion and opposition is misleading, however. Dostoevsky's point is not how distant the nihilists and materialists are, but how every aspect of Russian life has been infected by their premises and is co-implicated by their logic. The novel is about the sick spiritual soil on which such an unholy weed could spring up. The "fathers" who don't recognize the ideas of the "sons" are therefore utterly self-deceiving. Although it is possible to identify the historical "originals" of the political events and ideological tracts that Dostoevsky dropped into the novel--Joseph Frank's biography pinpoints the sources for almost everything in the novel--the specifics of ideology here disappear into a spiritual condemnation, both "fathers and sons" representing a moral sickness to be expelled. If there is a political point, it is to hold up the unholy, Iago-like figure of Pyotr Stepanovich to the "beautiful souls" who, horrified, innocently disavow his actions when they come to light.
As with the reading of the raising of Lazarus in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky includes here a reading from the Gospels which is unmistakably central to the novel's meaning. It is an explication of the title, Demons. The passage (which is also the novel's epigraph) is the one where Christ expels a horde of demons from a man, who then enter a herd of swine, and rush into a lake to drown. [Luke 8:32-6]. The pompous, pretentious Stepan Trofimovich, whose life has been lived as a "reproach incarnate" to his fatherland, and is now on a Quixotic last mission to the authentic people, provides this explication:
"You see, it's exactly like our Russia. These demons who come out of a sick man and enter into swine--it's all the sores, all the miasmas, all the uncleanness, all the big and little demons accumulated in our great and dear sick man, in our Russia, for centuries, for centuries! Oui, cette Russie que j'aimais toujours. But a great will and a great thought will descend to her from on high, as upon that insane demoniac, and out will come these demons, all the uncleanness, all the abomination that is festering on the surface... and they will beg of themselves to enter into swine! And perhaps they already have! It is us, us and them, and Petrusha [his son Pyotr Stepanovich].. et les autres avec lui, and I, perhaps, first, at the head, and we will rush, insane and raging, from the cliff down into the sea, and all be drowned, and good riddance to us, because that's the most we're fit for. But the sick man will be healed.The enigmatic center of this possession is Nikolai Stavrogin, a strikingly handsome and reserved, but cruel, almost insanely sadistic monster. He is a "great idle force being spent deliberately on abomination," on cold-blooded, self-maiming depravity.
The plot of Demons is the gradual escalation of these rifts into delirious catastrophe. Dostoevsky's plots don't work through "incident" or "character development," but are just the emergence and amplification of all the latent positions and differences at the beginning of the novel. The classic Balzac plot is a "rise and fall," in a Flaubert novel "things turn sour," in a Dickens novel "long-lost" identities are recognized (and perhaps rejected) and alternate families formed, in a George Eliot novel idealistic projects have to be weighed against a compromising reality. A Dostoevsky novel is just the entropy of various initial positions racing each other to reach the highest pitch of disaster.
Not that everything preordained is foreknown. Just as there is a "murder mystery" in The Brothers Karamazov, so in Demons we do not know what Pyotr Stepanovich's conspiratorial ambulations amount to until the last moment. By contrast, in Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov has long ago announced the theory of his murder in a kind of manifesto, and the earliest scenes show him planning the crime. It is anything but a "whodunnit?". The Idiot is less plotted than any book I know: everything is on the table from the outset, and the suspense is in who will dare to put their self-destructive impulses into action first.
There is more Dostoevsky to come, so let me address here just a few points: the sense of scandal in his work; and more particular to Demons, the characters of Kirillov and Stavrogin,
Scandal
In the famous "Grand Inquisitor" passage from The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan cites the ultimate scene of flailing, impotent outrage and escalating provocation: Satan's temptation of Christ in the desert. The synoptic Gospels' account also provides a window into the "polyphonic" nature of frustrated, scandalous discourse, in Satan's citation of Psalms: "For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a stone."
Characters in Dostoevsky are relentlessly flinging themselves into imprudent, degrading confrontations and making dubious spectacles of their humiliation. Provocation stands on constant call. The key to this trait is given in Notes from the Underground: the underground man's retreat from society and his aching contempt stand in constant need of advertisement, of recognition, of exhibition. Consequently, Dostoevsky's novels sometimes read as one outlandish "scene" after another, an unbroken fever dream.
(This recognition and validation is the entire point of Raskolnikov's crime; he does not have a goal other than to create an objectively recognized deed that would finalize his self-image.)
Scandal in Dostoevsky looks like exposure, confession, the baring of the self, a revealing "slip." It is none of these things. The overwhelming irony of these scenes, however, is that humiliation and the parading of weakness are inevitably self-protective. The terror is that one will be "out in the world," a weak and ineffectual body, beyond all excuses and apologies and exposed to the ravages of time and the indignities of life. The scandalous rant is a buffer, a filibuster. There is always preserved some escape clause, some hope that this part of life (this moment here) won't really "count." Amidst even the most outrageous, disgraceful rants is always included a plea for one's exceptionalism. Better always to be indefinite than finite. Look at the novelist Karmazinov's farewell address at Yulia Mikhailovna's "literary fête":
"Farewell, reader; I do not even much insist that we should part friends: why, indeed, trouble you? Abuse me, even, oh, abuse me as much as you like, if it gives you any pleasure. But it will be best of all if we forget each other forever. And if all of you, readers, should suddenly be so good as to fall on your knees and entreat me with tears: 'Write, oh, write for us, Karmazinov--for the fatherland, for posterity, for the wreaths of laurel'--even then I would answer you, having thanked you, of course, with all courtesy: 'Ah, no, we have had enough of bothering each other, my dear compatriots, merci! It is time we parted ways! Merci, merci, merci.' "This self-denial, which is being met with boos and catcalls from the crowd and is a disgraceful prelude to the evening's further dissipation, all but begs to be allowed back in the door through which he is at that moment elaborately withdrawing.
The logic of the scandalous discourse--the manifesto, the "scene," the offensive reading, the ill-advised party--is this: anything rather than stoicism and finitude. Rather than face concrete reality: words, words, words. What one is evading, always, is the banality and dependencies and finalities of being in the world with other persons, defenseless against cares. The self-importance of the scandal purports to "hold back" some image of the self which would not be tainted by finitude or need...
Stavrogin
Consider Stavrogin's confession in this light. Dostoevsky was forced to cut this chapter (II, 9), which is now included as an appendix. Stavrogin confesses to the bishop Tikhon the most unholy abominations--raping a young girl who then commits suicide. The bishop promptly locates the defensiveness in Stavrogin's account: "Let them look at me, you say; well, and you yourself, how are you going to look at them? ... You admire your own psychology... what is that if not the proud challenge of a guilty man to his judge?" Stavrogin substitutes his own hatred for the pity of others, and is "in the grip of a desire for martyrdom and self-sacrifice."
Stavrogin is haunted by hallucinations: "he sometimes saw or felt near him some malicious being, scoffing and 'reasonable,' 'in various faces and characters, but one and the same'... 'It's I myself in various aspects and nothing more.'"
This is the central idea of the novel: Stavrogin "in various characters." René Girard writes that Stavrogin is "a magnet for unattached desires," but he cannot accept any of these appearances. The realization of his ideas mocks and torments him.
"I've tried my strength everywhere. You advised me to do that, in order to 'know myself.' This testing for myself, and for show, proved it to be boundless, as before all my life... What to apply my strength to--that I have never seen, nor do I see it now... What poured out of me was only negation, with no magnanimity and no force. Or not even negation."I always say about Dostoevsky that his Christianity has to be thought in terms of accepting the finality and limitedness of the world, and his atheistic characters have to be thought of as refusing it. This is the irony of Dostoevsky's crusade against nineteenth-century "materialism." Stavrogin refuses any action at all, knowing that even negation would be to "know himself." Dostoevsky equates reality with "knowing oneself," while for Stavrogin, the underground man, Raskolnikov, "knowing oneself" is a project of confessional elaboration as a substitute for reality.
