Demons – and why this century and a half old classic resonates today

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons is a story about forces within a small Russian town beset by conflict and intrigue, while showcasing philosophical issues including faith, existentialism and the nihilism sweeping across mid-19th century Russia.  The approach – creating a village, replete with personalities we can connect with – creates human experiences with personal struggles around self-discovery, moral relativism and exploitation. The central conflict between individual rights and the collective offers an incisive - and prescient - criticism of the Marxist ideologies spreading across Europe and Russia at the time. The eponymous ‘Demons’ are actually ideas, in this story, ideas in pursuit of Utopia.

The story changed over its lengthy development.  The main protagonist, Nikolai Stavrogin, had originally been the subject of a different story, “The Prince”.  Nikolai embodied a flawed individual struggling for his place within a changing society, through social order, romance, and honor.  He personifies many ideas underpinning Existentialism, the idea that individuals create their own purpose and meaning, through agency: authenticity, suffering, and personal responsibility. Nikolai’s rejection of the collective, his personal journey for meaning, his romantic tragedy. The author gives us  a human character to embody the philosophy fathered by Søren Kierkegaard, developed by Nietsche, and brought into the 20th Century by Camus and Sartre.

His opposite, Pyotr Verkhovensky, viewed the collective as a more important, worthy, and useful construct.  His pursuit toward Utopia underlies justification for theft, arson, murder and more.  His relationship with another troubled individual, Kirilov – won’t reveal details here – may be the most telling, the most disturbing. Verkenhovsy is the moral relativist: the ends justify the means.  How do apparently good people do bad things to other people, with moral justification?   Through ideas, humanity’s Demons.

In a disturbingly foretelling scene, in a secret meeting of a half dozen or so revolutionaries, attendees cite familiar slogans and personal offenses until the learned ‘lame man’, Smerdyokov, begins his soliloquy. “Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism.” (p403).  He defends the prospect of revolution to achieve a more perfect socialist society.  The book’s central character Pyotr Verkhovensky states, “a new religion is on the way to replace the old one.” (p407)  

Another character at the meeting, Shigalov, posits that 10% of the people will lord over the remaining 90%, the ‘herd’.  Russia had freed its serfs in 1861, barely a decade before the book’s publication; is progressivism reverting to past injustice, only under a new ruling class?  On Dostoevsky’s auguries, consider that in China today, a nation of 1.4 billion souls, about 100 million are Communist Party members, roughly 7%.  That’s today’s communism, a century and a half after this fictional work’s projection.

Shigalyev further goes on to suggest that a hundred million heads could roll to achieve this new order. “What I promote is not vileness but paradise”.  As the 20th Century revealed, estimates of death by communist dictators (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) run from 40 million to 148 million people.  That these estimates involve a rounding error of 100 million innocents is a testament to the impact on humanity.  The breadth also questions active vs. passive, direct or consequential: whether mass starvation caused by central planning is included for example, or whether the estimates are limited to murdering people who didn’t conform.

A memorable description of Russia’s leaders (by Shatov, a simpler, lower birth character) reflects a timeless populist perspective: “These men of yours never loved the people!... One cannot love what one does not know, and they understood nothing about the Russian people!” (p38).  America’s heartland today deeply distrusts liberal urban elites for similar detachment: social engineering that has gone so massively wrong, with no accountability. (Sidebar: After a century of witnessing the human cost of communism as a social order, Thomas Sowell cited Frederick Hayek on the love affair today’s Academy has with the oppressor vs, oppressed neo-Marxist construct so central to the leftist view: They’d be in charge!  The Thinkers, telling the Doers, how to live!)  Today’s elites cannot understand people because they have not experienced the broader world; the solution remains to oversee them, armed with imaginary constructs – ideas.  Demons.  Dostoevsky’s warnings were prescient and appear timeless, even today.

Dostoevsky explores faith and culture as well, highlighting the difference between a divine influence on individuals in an orderly functioning society – think the Ten Commandments – and government-imposed diktats on behavior. While faith does not play as central a role as in The Brothers Karamazov (my review here), a personal relationship with God provides spiritual guideposts for the existentialist.  As the first protagonist Stepan Trofimovich states “I believe [in God] as in a being who is conscious in himself in me.” (p37). Juxtapose the atheist, with rational utilitarianism in pursuit of a perfect society.

The former limits individual behavioral excesses through relationships with and deference to a higher power; the latter through manufactured moral constructs (utopia), necessarily enforced by coercion and violence. History offers well-known examples of the distinction. The French and Russian Revolutions, inspired by rationalism, utilitarianism, and atheism, unleashed unbridled savagery and human suffering. (Not to mention vicious rulers and bad neighbors). The English and American Revolutions on the other hand refer to Judeo-Christian beliefs, including individual responsibility for one’s own existence, with equality of all before God (and by extension, under the law). Thomas Paine’s Common Sense and the opening lines from the Declaration of Independence expressly cite divine inspiration as basis for protecting human freedom from oppressive government.  The distinction between a rationally executed utopia and a society where institutions protect individual liberties from government resonates today.  As government imposed social policy becomes increasingly consequential to our lives, more citizens seek agency through political order.  The result?  Politics alone divides communities and undermines relationships. We all know it's bad.

The author thus poses a timeless question for society: are we better when organized by the most powerful lording over the herd, or by allowing individuals to pursue his or her own potential to the degree their industriousness and perseverance takes them?  The former will yield more order, the latter more chaos and unequal outcomes.  Is all that foregone human potential – and the attendant violence and suffering - worth it?

The question of the human proclivity to embrace ideas is a deeper one.  Ideas guide us through life, create order from chaos, motivate us, and may incite evil behavior with moral justification.  These topics have been publicly aired throughout the 20th Century and into the 21st, but Dostoevsky’s small Russian village captured the essence of these forces.  It’s broadly considered one of the most important books in the western canon. Its prescience is undeniable.

Fair warning: the prose is dense, and details matter.  The book felt like a day-long meal: a spectrum of morsels with different tastes, best taken slowly, in pieces, enjoying the company, pushing through the distasteful, and experiencing the whole.  If you’re willing to pay the price, you’ll book an experience that may last a lifetime.  And it may clarify the world for you as is has for me.

Note: page numbers shown are from the Knopf publication of Demons, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky ©1994