Show Summary Details
Page of

Subscriber: null; date: 18 February 2025

p. viiIntroductionlocked

p. viiIntroductionlocked

  • Michael R. Katz

In a letter written from Dresden, dated 8 October 1870, addressed to his publisher, Fyodor Dostoevsky described the difficulty he was having with the new novel he’d begun writing:

For a very long time I had trouble with the beginning of the work. I rewrote it several times. To tell the truth, something happened with this novel that had never happened to me before: week after week, I would keep putting aside the beginning and work on the ending instead … What I can guarantee is that, as the novel progresses, it will hold the reader’s interest. It seems to me that the way I have it now is for the best.

That novel was Besy (1871–2), or Devils, although it has also been translated into English as The Possessed. It was the third of Dostoevsky’s five major works—preceded by Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Idiot (1868), followed by A Raw Youth, or The Adolescent (1875), and The Brothers Karamazov (1879).

Dostoevsky wrote Devils at a particularly painful time in his life. He was living in Western Europe and was not only short of money, but kept losing at the gambling tables. His health had taken a turn for the worse: he was suffering an increase in the frequency of epileptic attacks and finding his strength ebbing as a result. His wife was ill, his baby daughter fretful. He had disturbing encounters with a number of West European radicals and revolutionaries and was desperately eager to return to Russia. In his intense longing, he devoured Russian newspapers and journals to keep informed of events and trends back home.

Devils is first and foremost a crucial link in a chain of ideological Russian novels written in the middle of the nineteenth century, each responding to its predecessor in several interesting ways. Alexander Herzen’s Who is to Blame? (1841–6) initiated the series with its penetrating examination of the question of culpability for the unhappy p. viiifate of its attractive but superfluous aristocratic hero and the talented young woman he comes to love. Ivan Turgenev replied to Herzen in his best-known work, Fathers and Sons (1862); there he shows a man of the younger generation, a self-styled nihilist, brought low by his involvement with an intelligent but unworthy society woman when he is forced to confront ‘the abyss of romanticism within himself’. In a novel with a more emphatic interrogative title, What is to be Done? (1865), Nikolai Chernyshevsky rewrites Turgenev’s novel, but presents a more sympathetic portrait of the ‘new people’, the younger generation of nihilist men and women, who manage to conduct their personal relationships in a manner consistent with their ideological convictions. In Devils Dostoevsky not only refers directly to the authors, characters, and themes in all of the above, but re-examines the fundamental questions raised and the agonizing answers offered by each work.

The title of Dostoevsky’s novel and its first epigraph are borrowed from Alexander Pushkin’s splendid literary ballad ‘Devils’ (1830). The poem combines visual images, repetition, parallelism, and refrains to create a haunting atmosphere in which external folkloric spirits are compared to internal demons tormenting the lyrical hero of the work. The novel’s second epigraph, the story of the Gadarene swine from St Luke’s Gospel, recounts a great miracle, a dramatic exorcism performed by Jesus in which devils are transferred to swine and promptly self-destruct, thus leaving the sick man restored to his right mind, sitting at the feet of Jesus. In a letter to his friend A. N. Maikov written in October 1870, Dostoevsky explained the relevance of this miracle to the meaning of his novel:

Exactly the same thing happened in our country: the devils went out of the Russian man and entered into a herd of swine, i.e. into the Nechaevs … et al. These are drowned or will be drowned, and the healed man … sits at the feet of Jesus. It couldn’t have been otherwise. Russia has spewed out all the filth she’s been fed and obviously there’s nothing Russian left in those spewed-out wretches.

Devils is at once both a political pamphlet and a religious tract. It emerges from two quite separate inspirations, one p. ixnarrowly ideological and programmatic, the other broadly spiritual and moral. In 1869, while still abroad, Dostoevsky learned the details of the notorious Nechaev case from his reading of Russian newspapers. A young student named Ivanov, a member of a secret revolutionary committee or cell called a ‘group of five’, had been murdered by Sergei Nechaev (1847–83), revolutionary and conspirator, disciple and friend of the anarchist Bakunin, co-author with him of the extraordinary Catechism of a Revolutionary (1866). Why was Ivanov murdered? Most likely because he’d begun to suspect Nechaev was nothing more than an impostor and con-man, and was threatening to expose them all to the authorities. Nechaev was afraid (or pretended to be so) and managed to persuade his co-conspirators to participate in the murder. Their victim’s body was disposed of in a pond. Afterwards Nechaev left Russia for Switzerland; he later returned, was quickly arrested, tried, convicted, and imprisoned in the Peter-Paul Fortress in Petersburg. He died in 1883. Both the transcript of Nechaev’s trial and the text of the Catechism were published in Russian newspapers.

Dostoevsky read the shocking account and was provoked to write a counter-revolutionary political pamphlet, a tendentious anti-nihilist tract, to expose the ‘new men’ once and for all, to explain the origin of their mistaken ideology, and to assign blame for their misguided activities. In February 1873 he went so far as to send a copy of his latest novel to the heir to the Russian throne, the future Tsar Alexander III. The letter accompanying the work stated the author’s intention in no uncertain terms:

It’s almost a historical study, in which I’ve sought to account for the possibility of such monstrous phenomena as the Nechaev movement occurring in our strange society … Our Belinskys and Granovskys would never have believed it if they’d been told they were the direct spiritual fathers of the Nechaev band. And it’s this kinship of ideas and their transmission from fathers to sons that I’ve tried to show in my work.

The other major source of inspiration for Devils was religious. For some time Dostoevsky had been working on p. xa huge project called ‘Atheism’, the story of a character’s loss of faith. The author’s plans for the work were sketchy: after falling from grace the hero was to undergo intense spiritual suffering and conduct a thorough investigation of all religious faiths. This magnum opus was never written, but it provided fuel for Dostoevsky’s last three novels.

In 1869 the main theme of ‘Atheism’ became intertwined with and then engulfed by a related idea. Dostoevsky began writing ‘The Life of a Great Sinner’: the main character was to be, sequentially, an atheist, a believer, a fanatic, a sectarian, and then an atheist again. Opposed to this fictional hero was a figure based on a real monk, Father Tikhon Zadonsky, who would reside in a monastery and represent true faith. The work was intended to resolve once and for all the question of God’s existence.

Dostoevsky’s Devils is a fusion of these two sources: it is on the one hand a powerful political pamphlet, an attack on nihilism, an investigation of its origins, a dire warning about future consequences if nothing is done to halt its spread. On the other hand it is a far-reaching spiritual quest, a search for God in the face of pervasive doubt, an examination of human behaviour in the absence of God, and an attempt to find the ultimate solution to the problem.

The political pamphlet has as its centre the young revolutionary Peter Verkhovensky and his motley band of conspirators, the ‘group of five’, in a squalid little provincial town in Russia. Early versions of this main character in the notebooks depict him as having neither faith nor programme; his only aim is to achieve power over others. He is obviously modelled on the historical figure of Nechaev, but emerges as a caricature of that iron-willed revolutionary. In the end he manages to escape all consequences of his actions and seek refuge in the West.

The spiritual quest has as its centre the mysterious figure of Stavrogin. At one point in the notebooks Dostoevsky writes: ‘Stavrogin is everything.’ Indeed, almost all characters in the novel can be defined in terms of their relationship to him: Varvara Stavrogina—his birth mother; Stepan Verkhovensky—his spiritual father; Tikhon—his father-confessor; p. xiPeter Verkhovensky—his idolater; Shatov and Kirillov—his ‘disciples’; Virginsky, Liputin, Lebyadkin, Lyamshin, Erkel and Fedka—his ‘devils’; and Liza, Dasha, Marya Lebyadkina, Matryosha and Marie Shatova—his ‘mistresses’.

There are few characters who don’t fit the scheme: Peter Verkhovensky’s ‘disciple’ Shigalyov, governor von Lembke and his wife Yulia Mikhailovna, the ‘great writer’ Karmazinov, and the narrator of the chronicle, Mr Govorov. But for the most part all the actions of other characters are organized around the presence, even the absence, of Stavrogin. When Dostoevsky maintains that ‘Stavrogin is everything’ perhaps what he really means is that ‘Stavrogin is nothing’—a cosmic ‘black hole’ at the centre of the novel’s moral universe. After his attempt at confession to Father Tikhon is aborted, and he fails to establish genuine relationships with any of his ‘mistresses’ (suggesting both his moral and sexual impotence), Stavrogin’s squalid, unheroic, ‘lukewarm’ implosion is inevitable.

Many characters spout ideological convictions expounded by Stavrogin at some previous stage in his life. The landscape is strewn with disciples and devils clinging to vestiges of his thought who distort and parody them beyond recognition. Shatov, for example, is an arch-Slavophile, who elevates the nation to godhood; his fanatic messianic nationalism knows no bounds. Kirillov, the arch-Westernizer, elevates man to godhood and his absurd individualism leads to self-annihilation.

Only Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, a character based on the Russian historian T. N. Granovsky, the ‘direct spiritual father’ of Nechaev’s band (as Dostoevsky instructed the future Tsar), and Stepan’s bizarre last journey and absurd confession—of his lifelong love for Varvara Stavrogina and his genuine faith in God—bring to final synthesis both the novel’s political theme and its spiritual quest. It is Stepan Trofimovich who ultimately interprets the story of the Gadarene swine from Luke, the one that serves as the second epigraph and that Dostoevsky himself had explained to Maikov in the letter quoted above. That letter continues:

p. xiiAnd bear this is mind, my dear friend: a man who loses his people and his national roots also loses the faith of his fathers and his God…. Well, if you really want to know—this is the theme of my novel in essence. It’s called Devils, and it describes how the devils entered into the herd of swine.

Certain aspects of Dostoevsky’s literary technique deserve particular attention. Mr Govorov, who combines the roles of objective narrator and eyewitness chronicler is quite extraordinary. At times he seems omniscient, at others, he claims or displays only limited knowledge of events and motives. His own ideological stance is problematic, as is his personal life (e.g. his frustrated affection for Liza). His speech is riddled with qualifications, hesitations and negations, combined with an infuriating reluctance to say all that he knows or thinks.

Devils is without doubt Dostoevsky’s most humorous work. It has more irony, more elements of burlesque and parody, more physical comedy and buffoonery, more exaggerated characterizations and ambiguous use of language than any of his other works. It has often been claimed that humour is ‘one of the things that gets lost in translation’. This new version attempts to capture some of the author’s comic devices and find suitable equivalents for them in English.

In the letter to Maikov quoted above Dostoevsky described his work on Devils:

There’s no doubt that I’ll write it badly; being more a poet than an artist, I’ve always tackled themes beyond my powers. And so I’ll make a mess of it, that’s for sure. The theme is too powerful. But, inasmuch as none of the critics who’ve thus far passed judgement on me has failed to accord me some talent, the chances are that this long novel won’t be too bad in spots. And that’s all I can say.

Surely that’s not all that can be said!

I would like to express my gratitude to Neill Megaw for supplying the poetry, Dina Sherzer for helping with the French, Sidney Monas and Bill Wagner for checking the footnotes, Russell Richardson for entering changes in the draft, p. xiiimy research assistants Julie Swann and Pete Smith for their help with the text, Sally Furgeson for her excellent proofreading, and Oxford University Press’s copy-editor for numerous suggestions, corrections, improvements and the translation of Lebyadkin’s poem in Part 3.

michael r. katz

The University of Texas