Demons
Fyodor Dostoevsky based Demons on the 1869 murder of a student by the Nechayev revolutionary cell, and built around it a sprawling novel about how a society loses its moral footing. The story unfolds in a provincial town where the aging liberal Stepan Verkhovensky and his pupils give way to a younger, colder generation led by his son Pyotr and the magnetic, half-empty Nikolai Stavrogin. As Pyotr organizes a cell, manipulates the local elite, and pushes toward an act of violence, Dostoevsky shows how abstract ideas about progress, atheism, and revolution translate into cruelty, suicide, and arson on the ground. The novel reads as a study of ideological possession, in which characters seem inhabited by ideas larger than they can carry. It also contains the famous suppressed chapter, At Tikhon's, in which Stavrogin confesses a crime that has shaped his soul.
Also by Fyodor Dostoevsky
What you might want to know about Demons
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Dostoevsky's novel of a provincial Russian town swallowed by a small circle of revolutionaries and the charismatic young man at its center.
Peterson cites Demons in his lectures as the most prophetic novel of the modern era, arguing that Dostoevsky saw with terrifying clarity how nineteenth-century revolutionary ideas would harden into the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, and how individuals become possessed by abstractions.
Yes. The novel has been published under both titles in English; modern translations by Pevear and Volokhonsky, and by Robert Maguire, use Demons, which is closer to the Russian Besy.
Demons was written by Fyodor Dostoevsky, published in 1872 by Vintage Classics.
Demons is 768 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Demons takes most readers 12 to 17 hours to finish.
Demons is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
