Dostoevsky's Demons was sparked by a real student murder in 1869 Moscow
In 1869 a radical cell led by Sergey Nechayev murdered one of its own members at a Moscow agricultural academy. Dostoevsky, who had once joined a revolutionary circle and paid for it in Siberia, turned the crime into Demons, a novel about ideas that seize people and a small town sliding into chaos.
Serialised in The Russian Messenger in 1871 and 1872, Demons stands with Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov among the four great novels Dostoevsky wrote after returning from exile. It is at once political satire, psychological drama and tragedy. Joyce Carol Oates called it his most confused and violent book and his most satisfying tragedy, while Ronald Hingley rated it perhaps the supreme achievement in prose fiction.
The plot follows an attempted revolution in a provincial town, engineered by the conspirator Pyotr Verkhovensky. Towering over everyone is Nikolai Stavrogin, an enigmatic aristocrat who exerts a strange hold on nearly every other character. Pyotr's father, Stepan, a Western-leaning idealist of the 1840s who once tutored Stavrogin, represents the older liberals Dostoevsky saw as unwitting parents of the destruction. The story is told by a minor figure, a local civil servant who somehow knows almost everything, which lets the narration drift towards omniscience.
The title has caused confusion. Constance Garnett's 1916 translation popularised The Possessed, but later translators reject it because the Russian word Besy names active agents, the possessors rather than their victims. The demons are ideas: translator Richard Pevear lists a legion of imported isms, from rationalism to nihilism, with atheism beneath them all. Dostoevsky drew the image from the Gospel story of devils driven into a herd of swine, part of which serves as the book's epigraph.
The novel merged two projects: a pamphlet against the radicals and an unfinished philosophical work on atheism, The Life of a Great Sinner. As writing went on, the nihilists slipped into the background and Stavrogin's amorality took centre stage. Unlike typical anti-nihilist fiction of the era, the radicals are not cardboard villains but ordinary people led astray by vanity, naivety and youthful idealism. Dostoevsky admitted that in his youth he might have followed a figure like Nechayev; commentators often see Nikolay Speshnev, leader of his own old secret cell, behind Stavrogin.
Source: Demons (Dostoevsky novel)
