Demons (Penguin Classics)

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Dostoevsky's nihilists are portrayed in their ordinary human weakness, drawn into the world of destructive ideas through vanity, naïveté, idealism, and the susceptibility of youth. Shatov, like myself and so many other cult members in real life, experiences in America a weakening of the ‘milieu control’ of the group.

He launches into an incoherent monologue, alternately passionately persuasive and grovelingly submissive, desperately pleading with Stavrogin to join his cause. He is depicted as an emotionally unstable man-child who cannot discipline his own son, and whose behaviour serves to corrupt the younger generation.In a written confession given to the monk Tikhon he tells of a number of crimes, including raping and driving to suicide a girl of only 11 years.

Semyon Yegorovich Karmazinov is Dostoevsky's literary caricature of his contemporary Ivan Turgenev, author of the proto-nihilist novel Fathers and Sons (1862). In one scene, von Lembke compares more moderate radicals like himself with the extremists like Pyotr Stepanovich, and argues that the relationship between them is like that between Whigs and Tories in 18th-century England. A renegade from revolution, he went to the opposite extreme, and became a loyal advocate of the most tyrannical and backward regime in the whole of Europe. As a younger man Shatov had idolized Stavrogin, but having seen through him and guessed the secret of his marriage, he seeks to tear down the idol in a withering critique.

Kirillov sums up Stavrogin's dilemma thus: "If Stavrogin believes, then he doesn't believe that he believes. She tries to ignore this however, and Pyotr Stepanovich is able to further ingratiate himself by subtly presenting her son's inexplicable behaviour in a favourable light. Dostoevsky saw Russia's growing suicide rate as a symptom of the decline of religious faith and the concomitant disintegration of social institutions like the family. For more details, please consult the latest information provided by Royal Mail's International Incident Bulletin.

The conspirators succeed in transforming her Literary Fête for the benefit of poor governesses into a scandalous farce. Shocked by some of the antics in the quadrille and the degenerating atmosphere in the hall, Andrey Antonovich lapses back into his authoritarian persona and a frightened Julia Mikhaylovna is forced to apologise for him. Dostoevsky wrote to Maykov that the chief theme of his novel was "the very one over which, consciously and unconsciously, I have been tormented all my life: it is the existence of God. His first book, Poor Folk, did very well but on 23rd April 1849 he was arrested for subversion and sentenced to death. Verkhovensky rushes after him again and, to Stavrogin's astonishment, suddenly transforms into a raving madman.Under interrogation from Pyotr Stepanovich, Captain Lebyadkin reluctantly confirms the truth of the whole story. Unsurprisingly, Lenin hated Dostoevsky and regarded him as a loathsome reactionary (Stalin and Trotsky appreciated him more). Dostoevsky had first heard of Ivanov from his brother-in-law, who was a student at the academy, and had been much interested in his rejection of radicalism and exhortation of the Russian Orthodox Church and the House of Romanov as the true custodians of Russia's destiny. 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. Whilst Dostoevsky’s depiction of the Russian revolutionaries of his time is very accurate and farsighted, we should be under no illusions.