Les Possédés
1872
Dostoevsky conceived Demons as a warning. In 1869, a revolutionary student murdered a former comrade who threatened to expose his terrorist cell. The novelist transmuted this real act of ideological fratricide into a terrifying portrait of a provincial Russian town infested with young men who believe nothing is true and everything is permitted. Pyotr Verkhovensky, a scheming revolutionary organizer, manipulates a cadre of impressionable idealists toward violent revolution while his mysterious, magnetic friend Stavrogin drifts through the chaos like a dark compass pointing nowhere. When the group faces exposure, the question becomes not whether they will kill for their cause, but whether they will kill each other to survive it. The result is savage, darkly comic, and unsettling in its understanding of how conviction curdles into cruelty, how ideology becomes a kind of spiritual possession, and how movements dedicated to liberating humanity can reduce their followers to demons.
Editions
X-Ray
“If you want to overcome the whole world, overcome yourself.””
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“God is necessary, and therefore must exist... But I know that he does not and cannot exist... Don't you understand that a man with these two thoughts cannot go on living?””
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“There are seconds, they come only five or six at a time, and you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony, fully achieved. It is nothing earthly; not that it's heavenly, but man cannot endure it in his earthly state. One must change physically or die. The feeling is clear and indisputable. As if you suddenly sense the whole of nature and suddenly say: yes, this is true. God, when he was creating the world, said at the end of each day of creation: 'Yes, this is true, this is good.' This . . . this is not tenderheartedness, but simply joy. You don't forgive anything, because there is no longer anything to forgive. You don't really love”
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“In sinning, each man sins against all, and each man is at least partly guilty for another's sin. There is no isolated sin.””
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“I do not wish you much happiness--it would bore you; I do not wish you trouble either; but, following the people's philosophy, I will simply repeat: 'Live more' and try somehow not to be too bored; this useless wish I am adding on my own.””
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“My friend, the truth is always implausible, did you know that? To make the truth more plausible, it's absolutely necessary to mix a bit of falsehood with it. People have always done so.””
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“God is the pain of the fear of death””
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“You cannot imagine what sorrow and anger seize one's whole soul when a great idea, which one has long and piously revered, is picked up by some bunglers and dragged into the street, to more fools like themselves, and one suddenly meets it in the flea market, unrecognizable, dirty, askew, absurdly presented, without proportion, without harmony, a toy for stupid children.””
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
“Full freedom will come only when it makes no difference whether to live or not to live. That’s the goal for everyone.””
— Fyodor Dostoyevsky
