With Demons on Sunday night becoming the fourth of Fyodor Dostoevsky's "great" novels that I have read,¹ and the only one so far in my post-collegiate years, the significance and accomplishments of Dostoevsky are finally becoming manifest. What appealed to me about Dostoevsky from the very start, reading the first page of Crime and Punishment as a high school senior, was how he chiefly wrote about ideas and -isms and their tyrannical control over characters with whom I easily identified, presented both with empathy and with rebuke (the characters and the ideas). His plots are compelling, at times melodramatic and complex, and filled with a so-called "polyphony" of dialogue and story.

Dostoevsky intimately knew how ideas could inspire yet lead to danger, he himself being involved with the mostly harmless Petrashevsky Circle that, when shut down by the Russian government, led to Dostoevsky's mock execution and sentencing to four years of hard labor in Siberia. Demons is the most political Dostoevsky book I've read, and its story directly springs from these personal struggles with the seeds of Russian revolution. It is also incredibly prescient.

The story follows a rather parochial revolutionary group within an unnamed Russian town who is manipulated by Western-influenced tracts and a fiery leader obsessed with power and expediency to participate in nihilistic acts of upheaval and in a gruesome political assassination. Their story is, of course, buried under romantic drama, intergenerational strife, gossip, and philosophical digressions, but is mysteriously dependent on Stavrogin, an ambiguous but charismatic character who, it seems to me, only barely misses by circumstance and chance in becoming a Lenin figure. Note that the book was written in the early 1870's not too long after the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, and herein lies its prescience: Dosteovsky almost completely foresees the Russian revolutions of the early 20th century, and the terrible violence that followed.

What I really want to get at here, though, is that while it's clear that Dostoevsky was tempted by and struggled with the radicalism and atheism of his day, in the end he remained a strong traditionalist both politically and religiously, fearing the consequences of the Russian movements then in vogue. Since I know in hindsight that Dostoevsky's fears were to be realized after his death,² I find myself celebrating his hesitant conservatism in late-19th century Russia to the same degree that I celebrate liberalism found in American literature during the same period.

But I also wonder how Dostoevsky would view the current battle of ideas in America,³ and here I think he would no longer be so fearful of liberal revolutionaries. Their ideas have nearly become co-opted into the mainstream, and where they haven't, their anger has been defrayed by venting on blogs, within film programs, and in alternative weeklies. He would merely laugh at their atheism, and more greatly fear the straying of mainstream religion from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. With the power of American politics in the hands of demagogues and a secretive oligarchy, I think he would either find himself bored with the far left⁴ or frightened by television populism and neoconservatism.

Incidentally, this was the first Dostoevsky translation I've read by the acclaimed husband-and-wife team Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The translation is fantastic, and has given me an excuse to soon reread The Brothers Karamazov. Apparently, there is a fascinating print-only New Yorker article out there called "The Translation Wars" (described here and here) that talks about the history of the translation of Russian novels. The article says that Pevear and Volokhonsky are working on a translation of War and Peace, and since I've never read any Tolstoy, I think I'll wait for their translation to start.⁵

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¹ The other novels I've read are Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and, naturally, The Brothers Karamazov. (return)

² See the Russian Revolution, especially as described by William T. Vollmann in his "Defense of Class" chapter in Rising Up and Rising Down, and the mass genocides that took place under Stalin in the following decades. (return)

³ Although, as David Foster Wallace makes clear in his "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" essay collected in Consider the Lobster, it has sadly become nearly impossible to write anything approaching a Dostoevsky novel in recent years. (return)

⁴ Incidentally, I think this is why Vollmann has travelled so much out of America and into countries filled with war and strife -- he intellectually desired to find the violent and revolutionary side of America and found better luck elsewhere. This is also why his writings on American violence focus on modern militias, skinheads, or pre-Revolutionary history. (return)

⁵ And perhaps I'll throw on some Beirut, the perfect musical accompaniment to Russian literature, during the read. (return)