Devils by Fyodor Dostoevsky

A Tragic and Intense (but at times funny) Look at the Human Condition

I loved The Brothers Karamazov but Devils is even better! I guess I don’t really have to choose between one or the other since they’re both so fantastic.

Are the shadows in your life demons?

When Nikolai Stavrogin, the charismatic figure the story revolves around, confesses his sins to Tikhon, a former priest who resides at the local monastery, he says that he often sees shadows. Tikhon asks what those shadows could be. Stavrogin says they are demons. Our adopted daughter, a victim of severe abuse often sees shadows too. Therapists have tried to convince her that the shadows are just manifestations of PTSD. Since her therapists have a proven track record of not knowing what they’re talking about, I was happy to see Stavrogin hold his ground on this. They were demons, these shadows. And why not?

The trauma of violence in all its many forms opens the door to evil—even when you afflict this trauma on yourself.

Devils opens with the famous Biblical story from Luke 8:32-33:

A large herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside. The demons begged Jesus to let them go into the pigs, and he gave them permission. When the demons came out of the man, they went into the pigs, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.

Dostoevsky introduces the reader to a host of demons who eventually throw those they’ve possessed into the sea. The demons are ideas.

I almost hesitate to call this a review. The verdict about the greatness of this novel is already in, but I do want to respond to it quickly while I know very little about what others have said about it. While the novel is a devastating critique of atheism, liberalism, nihilism, and probably a bunch of other isms, it’s also a critique of parenting and the lack of preserving a spiritual heritage.

Varvara Stavrogina has her son Nikolai educated in the fashionable, liberal European views of the world. She hires a tutor, Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky , a once well-known liberal, who helps seed the younger generations with “Big Ideas.” Years later Varvara worries over rumors she hears about her adult son but is too caught up in her own liberal plans and her conflicted relationship with Stepan.

Stepan is a lazy liberal who loves the idea of being a deep thinker. While sowing revolutionary ideas (the devils in the swine) into his students, he neglects his own son, Peter Verkhovensky. Later he watches in befuddlement as his son and his students throw themselves into the sea. His redemption at the end of the book is tragic because it comes too late too late for him to save anyone else.

“The whole law of human existence consists in nothing other than a man's always being able to bow before the immeasurably great. If people are deprived of the immeasurably great, they will not live and will die in despair.”

Stepan’s neglected son, Peter, has picked up the ideas of revolutionaries and organized an secret “inner circle” to overthrow the established order. He believes by destroying the old ways his group can attain godhood in a new utopian society. With this comes a complete lack of human compassion and a tendency to worship idols—his idols being Nikolai Stavrogin and violence. Chaos for him seems more important than ideology.

Peter is the snake, the devil prowling to see whom he can devour. I kept thinking of C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters whenever Peter arrived on the scene. Charming, pretty, and cunning, he shows Stavrogin all he could have if only he would embrace his place as messiah, like Satan trying to tempt Christ.  Stavrogin tries to brush him off but doesn’t have the will to do so. How often are we too lazy to push off bad ideas?

Stavrogin is the lukewarm church of Revelations. He’s the reasonable man who won’t allow himself to truly take part or believe in anything too deeply. He’s constantly questioning his own motives and too paralyzed to take charge of his life and deal with his demons (demons he’s become comfortable with).

“…if Stavrogin believes, he does not believe that he believes. And if he does not believe, he does not believe that he does not believe.”

The problem of disbelieving in God is not that a man ends up believing nothing. Alas, it is much worse. He ends up believing anything.

G.K. Chesterton

Stavrogin’s confessions are poignant and ultimately frustrating because he’s so lost in ideas. Faith is just beyond him. He’s tested the world through debauchery that he admits he doesn’t even enjoy. He doesn’t trust his own regrets or the guilt he can’t escape from (though events conspire to keep him a “free” man). He refuses to allow for God’s forgiveness because his pride won’t allow him to forgive himself. This sin is a most destructive one because it leads to despair and impotency in the face of evil.

“You are in the grip of a desire for martyrdom and self-sacrifice; conquer this desire as well, set aside your pages and your intention--and then you will overcome everything. You will put to shame all your pride and your demon! You will win, you will attain freedom...”

Dostoevsky reminds the reader again and again that Stavrogin is a handsome man. Because he doesn’t trust the goodness (or beauty) in himself, he believes he cannot be saved. He is given every worldly thing, but he is incapable of believing he deserves love. Raising young people to hate their heritage and to see themselves as parasites on earth leads to nihilism.

A few people see beyond Stavrogin’s cool veneer and into his inner suffering, but they are unable to free him from his intellectual and spiritually bankrupt trap.  Because at times he is so passive, terrible but preventable things happen. At other times, in a fruitless desire to rise above both good and evil he commits unspeakable crimes.

“I've tested my strength everywhere. You advised me to do that, "in order to know myself." This testing for myself, and for show, proved it to be boundless, as before all my life. In front of your very eyes I endured a slap from your brother; I acknowledged my marriage publicly. But what to apply my strength to--that I have never seen, nor do I see it now, despite your encouragements in Switzerland, which I believed. I am as capable now as ever before of wishing to do a good deed, and I take pleasure in that; along with it, I wish for evil and also feel pleasure. But both the one and the other, as always, are too shallow, and are never very much. My desires are far too weak; they cannot guide. One can cross a river on a log, but not on a chip.”

I think of the children I meet in my daughter’s therapeutic residential home. They are told to find themselves, be themselves etc. They are very rarely told that they are responsible for their own actions or that their actions are even bad. They are never told there is a higher power or something more beautiful to live for. Like all lukewarm churches the therapeutic environment would rather not hurt feelings or discuss sin. Sin and even beauty are old ideas and not one of the -isms that even the most well-intentioned workers have ingested from a society worshipping Godless victimhood. Taking this to its extreme the most loving thing to do is to allow a person to self-destruct in the name of freedom.

Aleksei Kirillov, a civil servant and disciple of Stavrogin, is a “victim” of Stavrogin in the sense that Nikolai seems to enjoy playing the devil’s advocate with his adoring fans. Kirillov takes atheism to its natural conclusion. If there is no god then he is god and the bravest thing to prove this is to take one’s own life. I think of population control people who don’t have the guts to eliminate themselves from the equation but are fine with offering up others.  

At a meeting of the secret group (full of young men carrying their own versions of modern demonic thought) one man presents a plan for humanity:

“Instead of paradise,” cried Lyamshin, “take nine-tenths of humanity and, if there’s no place to put them, I’d blow them up and leave only a few handfuls of educated people who’d begin to live their lives in a scientific manner.”

It’s impossible not to compare my experiences as a young liberal student at NYU and then working on farms that embraced all the -isms to the events and people in the novel. This book is intense but also extremely funny. I sometimes laugh in the same way at followers of the -isms I see on social media. But so many of the progressive or revolutionary ideas are destructive. Nothing good comes from worshipping man-made things. If we ingest the demonic theories of the past few centuries our destruction is assured.

I loved this book so much I’ve decided to read another translation of it in the near future.