In the Library
Demons
Fyodor Dostoevsky, 1872
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 18 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Constance Garnett
- Chapters
- Chapters 27
- Length
- Length 255k words
£1.99
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If there is no God, then I am God.
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If you like this, try
Notes from the Underground
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Notes from the Underground does the same thing, but compresses the whole argument into one bitter voice instead of a town full of believers acting it out.
£1.99
The Secret Agent
Joseph Conrad
The Secret Agent does the same thing, but sets its cell of provocateurs and bombers in London fog, following the same ordinary faces toward the same appalling logic.
£1.99
About the book
Devils driven from a madman enter a herd of swine, who stampede into the lake and drown. That is the parable Dostoevsky nails above this novel, then makes literal: a circle of provincial idealists, trading borrowed slogans about revolution and the death of God, talk themselves step by step into murdering one of their own, simply to bind the group in a shared, unconfessable guilt. Pyotr Verkhovensky orchestrates the killing with the ease of a man arranging a dinner party. Nikolai Stavrogin, the beautiful, bored center everyone else orbits and no one understands, cannot even locate in himself the horror the reader feels on his behalf. Dostoevsky was not writing satire; he had watched real students do exactly this, and wrote Demons as a warning about what rushes in to fill the space where belief in something larger used to stand. No novel has diagnosed the coming century's terrorism and its cults more exactly, or with less mercy for the men who mistake destruction for meaning.