These are drowned or will be drowned, and the healed man, from whom the devils have departed, sits at the feet of Jesus." Part of the passage is used as an epigraph, and Dostoevsky's thoughts on its relevance to Russia are given voice by Stepan Verkhovensky on his deathbed near the end of the novel. In a letter to his friend Apollon Maykov, Dostoevsky alludes to the episode of the Exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac in the Gospel of Luke as the inspiration for the title: "Exactly the same thing happened in our country: the devils went out of the Russian man and entered into a herd of swine. According to translator Richard Pevear, the demons are "that legion of isms that came to Russia from the West: idealism, rationalism, empiricism, materialism, utilitarianism, positivism, socialism, anarchism, nihilism, and, underlying them all, atheism." The counter-ideal (expressed in the novel through the character of Ivan Shatov) is that of an authentically Russian culture growing out of the people's inherent spirituality and faith, but even this-as mere idealization and an attempt to reassert something that has been lost-is another idea and lacks real force. For Dostoevsky, 'ideas' are living cultural forces that have the capacity to seduce and subordinate the individual consciousness, and the individual who has become alienated from his own concrete national traditions is particularly susceptible. 'Demons' in this sense refers not so much to individuals as to the ideas that possess them. They argue that " The Possessed" points in the wrong direction because Bésy refers to active subjects rather than passive objects-" possessors" rather than " the possessed". Constance Garnett's 1916 translation popularized the novel and gained it notoriety as The Possessed, but this title has been disputed by later translators. There are three English translations: The Possessed, The Devils, and Demons. The original Russian title is Bésy ( Russian: Бесы, singular Бес, bés), which means "demons". The idealistic, Western-influenced generation of the 1840s, epitomized in the character of Stepan Verkhovensky (who is both Pyotr Verkhovensky's father and Nikolai Stavrogin's childhood teacher), are presented as the unconscious progenitors and helpless accomplices of the "demonic" forces that take possession of the town. The mysterious aristocratic figure of Nikolai Stavrogin-Verkhovensky's counterpart in the moral sphere-dominates the book, exercising an extraordinary influence over the hearts and minds of almost all the other characters. A fictional town descends into chaos as it becomes the focal point of an attempted revolution, orchestrated by master conspirator Pyotr Verkhovensky.
Joyce Carol Oates has described it as "Dostoevsky's most confused and violent novel, and his most satisfactorily 'tragic' work." According to Ronald Hingley, it is Dostoevsky's "greatest onslaught on Nihilism", and "one of humanity's most impressive achievements-perhaps even its supreme achievement-in the art of prose fiction." ĭemons is an allegory of the potentially catastrophic consequences of the political and moral nihilism that were becoming prevalent in Russia in the 1860s. Demons is a social and political satire, a psychological drama, and large-scale tragedy. It is considered one of the four masterworks written by Dostoevsky after his return from Siberian exile, along with Crime and Punishment (1866), The Idiot (1869), and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Bésy, IPA: sometimes also called The Possessed or The Devils is a novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, first published in the journal The Russian Messenger in 1871–72. Demons ( pre-reform Russian: Бѣсы post-reform Russian: Бесы, tr.
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