Most of the characters are extremely unlikable, and while the first section of the novel is surprisingly funny, the novel soon assumes dark, ominous tones. It’s wildly discursive, and Dostoevsky is not concerned with standard forms–as a result there are some loose ends.

While Pyotr has his personal reasons for destroying Shatov, he enjoys playing the puppet master and manipulating everyone else to commit the crime.ĭemons is not without its problems. Pyotr is a master manipulator who convinces his followers that one of the members of the secret society, Shatov, is about to inform against them. Absolute abandonment of all moral codes of behaviour, and total blind obedience is demanded from the group’s members. At the same time, Stepan’s estranged son, Pyotr also shows up, and these two young men are part of a secret circle of conspirators whose radical ideas include plotting the deaths of the Tsar and his family. Varvara’s son, the elegant and cold lady-killer Nikolai Stavrogin returns to his mother’s estate after some years of absence. After Varvara’s endeavors fail abysmally, she returns to the provinces, and her disgruntlement falls squarely on Stepan. Here, she “invented a costume” for Stepan, her resident pet dissident, with the intention of holding radical meetings in her salon, and she eventually even establishes a radical political magazine. Petersburg friend, the indomitable Varvara has illusions of herself as a society hostess and she drags Stepan off to St. The relationship between these two has worked quite well for years, but when the novel begins, the relationship is about to enter a tumultuous stage. Stepan fancies himself as a scholar and a radical, and he’s encouraged in this idea by his wealthy patroness, Varvara Stavrogin, the widow of a general. Dostoevsky’s novel begins with the introduction of Stepan Verkhovensky–a middle-aged, would-be intellectual whose early claim to fame is that he wrote an inflammatory, revolutionary tract or two decades early. Nechaev, ostensibly dedicated to revolutionary activities, used a range of tactics–including blackmailing friends–in order to rope them into his revolutionary organization.ĭemons is a vast, complex novel that examines Russian society through a large cast of characters.

Dostoevsky’s brother-in-law was personally acquainted with the victim who was lured into a park and horribly murdered by a group of his fellow revolutionaries led by Sergei Nechaev. “There is something horrible, dirty and bloody on your soul.”įyodor Dostoevsky based his powerhouse novel Demons on a real-life murder case that occurred in 1869 involving a student named Ivanov.

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