Dostoevsky's Demons (background)

Sometimes I find it hard to get chronology correct, particularly when I am looking into when an author wrote certain works.  And this gets more muddled the further I am going from my own time and culture.  As a prime example, it feels to me that Demons sort of prefigures Crime and Punishment, and that Dostoevsky was "working up" to Crime and Punishment, though in fact Crime and Punishment was the earlier work and any connections between the two are deliberate or unconscious echoes in Demons.

I suppose I am imposing my (limited) knowledge of Dostoevsky's life onto his work and assuming that the pattern holds -- he got involved to some degree with progressive or utopian groups considered deelpy "subversive," he was caught and went through a mock execution (which many felt worsened his epilepsy), he was exiled to Siberia for 8 years and only later was he allowed to return and granted permission to publish his various works.  Thus, the logical order of the books might be something like Demons (all about the mischief caused by self-proclaimed revolutionaries), Crime and Punishment (where one could argue that Raskolnikov ultimately welcomes being caught and paying for his crimes with exile) and Memoirs from the House of the Dead (a lightly fictionalized treatment of his exile in Siberia).

However, the order is exactly the reverse, so one might say that Dostoevsky was sort of processing through his life traumas backwards, though certainly starting with the painful outcome of his "crimes" (i.e. exile in Siberia) and then moving to the root causes.  While one can definitely see some strong echoes of Memoirs from the House of the Dead in Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn doesn't really put forward the idea that there is redemption in suffering, as he never accepted the notion that he was at all to blame, whereas Dostoevsky does internalize his "guilt" to a considerable extent.  After his return from exile, Dostoevsky rejects completely (as far as I can tell) his former political vision.  He actually turns against Turgenev, who was still accepted in progressive circles, and there is quite the poison-pen portrait of Turgenev in Demons (the vain writer Karmazinov).  His works do carry a tinge of mysticism about them and the most foolish characters are generally the ones who continue to reject religion.  This may be why Isaiah Berlin never really takes a shine to him and discusses him only briefly in Russian Thinkers (largely dismissing him*), though he has a lot to say about Tolstoy, who basically strikes me as having the same sort of religious leanings as Dostoevsky and one who suffered far less for his political views.  I still have a ways to go in Russian Thinkers, and I'll certainly be returning to this general theme of how political many of these great Russian novels really are.

This post is going astray to the point that I think I'll break it in half and write the actual review of Demons in the second half, which I should be able to get to tonight (famous last words!).  Anyway, in the introduction, Pevear argues that this is one of the five great novels upon which Dostoevsky's fame rests. (I should note that until fairly recently Demons was more frequently translated as The Possessed.)  The other three are clearly Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot (as it happens I don't rate The Idiot at all but many others do).  I'm pretty sure they don't mean The Adolescent (or Raw Youth).  Despite Pevear's spirited defense of it in their recent translation, it has pretty much always been classified as a minor work. I think he must have meant either Notes from Underground or The Gambler, and probably the former.**  It doesn't really matter, but I am just curious.

Next week I am going to tackle The Double for what I believe is the first time (though first reading some of the stories by Gogol that inspired Dostoevesky to write The Double) as well as The Gambler.  Looking over the list of major and semi-major works by Dostoevsky, that would only leave a few left which I have never read before:
Poor Folks
The Landlady (which I may well skip)
Uncle's Dream
The Village of Stepanchikovo (or The Friend of the Family)
The Insulted and Humiliated
X The Eternal Husband
The Adolescent

Now I don't really feel I have to read all of these, or indeed perhaps any of them, but if I do, I will probably try to end on The Eternal Husband or The Insulted and Humiliated rather than with The Adolescent (which pace Pevear still strikes me as fairly minor).  In any case, I think my time would be somewhat better spent in rereading Crime and Punishment (tentatively slated for 2015) and The Brothers Karamazov (not yet put back into queue) and certainly reading Tolstoy's War and Peace for the first time, and only then would I consider these somewhat secondary works.  But of course, it is so hard to tell.  I ended up liking Demons quite a bit, though its impact would have been greater had I read it a bit earlier (and certainly at a time when I could have gotten through it in a week or two rather than stretched out to close to a month!).  So the proper review is yet to follow, but I have quite a bit planned for this afternoon, so I have to go.



* I really wonder if it is that fact Berlin is on "Team Ivan (Turgenev)" and not on "Team Fyodor" that makes him appear so dismissive of Dostoevsky.  Anyway, the more typically asked question is Dostoevsky vs. Tolstoy.  There are some quite interesting comments here, including the bon mot that Dostoevsky is for adolescence and Tolstoy for adulthood.  This is naturally insulting, but I suppose there is some truth in it.  I did read a fair bit of Dostoevsky in my teen years (and Fathers and Sons) but almost no Tolstoy, and that did shape me (aside from the religious frenzy one finds periodically in Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov) to the point where I naturally still side with Dostoevsky.  You get them young, and they can never escape that influence.  It's probably for the best that in my teens I was unaware of the spat between Dostoevsky and Turgenev.

** Upon rereading that is exactly what he means -- that The Adolescent is ranked among Dostoevsky's best 5 novels, though I think this is only in Pevear's imagination.