Devils (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

In the seminal early 2000s comedy series 'Freaks and Geeks', young Sam Weir, set a homework assignment on Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment', remarks to his father that the novel is "really weird, and all the characters have really long names". Like all such gnomic simplifications, this description of Dostoevsky's work certainly contains a grain of truth, but once the Western reader gets over the patronymics, there's a great deal more to discover.

Despite my extremely thorough literary education, I had not actually heard of 'Devils' before. This book first gained my attention in the way so many others have, that is, by looking beautiful on the shelves of Waterstones. Accusations of shallowness be damned, there's nothing like a well designed cover to set the imagination of the reader racing. When I picked this tome up just after Christmas and read the blurb, I was instantly entranced. Revolutionaries running riot in a provincial Russian backwater? Sounded like my type of thing. Soon after, my girlfriend brought it home as a surprise gift. The past two months have been spent worshipping at its altar. This is a truly astonishing work of literature. 

The primary problem with any literature originally written in a foreign tongue is that a great deal is lost in translation. One particular issue with editions of Dostoevsky is that often, the biting social satire and absurdist comedy he is so adept at fall by the wayside. Michael Katz, of the University of Texas, is therefore to be congratulated for endeavouring to embue this new Oxford World's Classics edition with the wit Dostoevsky intended it to possess in the first place. The novel, assumed to be set in the 1860s, starts as a gentle satire of the Liberalism that swept through Russia in the 1840s, primarily through the narrator's observations of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhoevensky, a former Professor of History whose impolitic liberal views got him dismissed from his post twenty years before the beginning of the novel. Following this dismissal, he finds himself the tutor to the son of provincial landowner Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina, an arrangement which has lead to Stepan Trofimovich becoming a kept wit on her estate, perfectly comfortable but a man of less consequence than he thinks, an absurdly vain little man living off past glories that were not actually particularly glorious. Stepan Trofimovich is a masterpiece of characterisation, with his self-conscious use of French phrases mixed into his Russian (for example "voyez vous" instead of "do you see") and his bilious attacks of nerves. Although he seems like a harmless innocent, almost a buffoon, it is, Dostoevsky shows us, his liberal ideals which lead inevitably to the warped radicalism of the younger generation. Specifically, it is the son of Stepan Trofimovich, Peter Stepanovich, who causes the chaos that subsequently consumes the town. Liberalism literally gives birth to Radicalism. Similarly, Varvara Petrovna's son Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin is shown to be an amoral black hole of charisma, completely out of touch with his fellow man, unable to take on the challenge of modernising relations between the aristocracy and everyday Russians but also unwilling to join the revolutionary movement as participant or figurehead; he is the ultimate nihilist. Only very slowly does Dostoevsky uncover the rot at the heart of this province, a group of revolutionaries put together and manipulated by Stepanovich. This occurs at a pace slow enough to be gripping but not slow enough to frustrate. Behind the comedy is tragedy, behind the farce is serious political comment.

Indeed, the 'Devils' of the title are the ideas that have torn Russia apart through the Nineteenth Century. Conservatism, Liberalism, Nihilism...all are at fault, as far as Dostoevsky is concerned. The metaphor is based on the scriptural story of the Gardarene Swine, into whom Christ cast the Devil after he had possessed a man. The swine ran into a deep lake and were drowned; the evil spirits destroyed themselves. Many critics have suggested that Dostoevsky intended to explicitly criticise Liberalism and Anarchism with this allusion, but in my view the establishment do not come off any better; the new governor of the province, Von Lembke, is a weak and marginalised figure expertly manipulated by Peter Stepanovich and ultimately humiliated and badly injured in front of the entire town. His wife is similarly disgraced when a literary fete she organises ends in uproar and controversy. Even the Russian Orthodox church is ridiculed, with icons routinely stolen and a hermit priest, Father Tikhon, the agency for a lengthy (but unacted on) confession by Stavrogin. The ultimate themes of the novel are chaos and confusion, in terms of action and in terms of ideas. No-one ever seems to know what they are doing, nor what their philosophy is. In this way, Dostoevsky accurately reflects real life, where idealists and dogmatic types alike constantly contradict themselves in debate.

This novel is a towering achievement. It is not only a fascinatingly complex tragedy of human frailty and vanity, it is also a burlesque of a dizzying array of political and philosophical ideas that is laugh out loud funny. The characters are compelling and moving, the final section a dazzling tour de force that ties up the loose ends that are strewn cavalier style throughout the first two sections. This is a book that everybody should read. A literary education is incomplete until you've read it.