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| Demons | Paperbackby Fyodor Dostoevsky (Author), Richard Pevear (Translator), Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator)
| List Price: | $17.95 | | Price: | $12.21 | | You Save: | $5.74 (32%) | | | Available: | Usually ships in 24 hours |
| | Binding: | Paperback | | Publisher: | Vintage | | Page Count: | 768 Pages | | Publication Date: | August 01, 1995 | | Sales Rank: | 130,925th |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horried Russians in 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a "novel-pamphlet" in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What emerged was a prophetic and ferociously funny masterpiece of ideology and murder in pre-revolutionary Russia. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.5 based on 34 reviews)
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A great books that's also great to read. by Eric Leventhal (Bflo, NY United States)  5 Stars
January 22, 2010
Most of these reviews are about the ideas and politics of Demons (aka The Possessed), or how it compares to Dostoevski's other novels and its place among the "great" books. But you probably know what the book is about already and prefer to make up your own mind about its position in the canon--after you read it.
What you really want to know is "will I like it?" The answer is emphatically YES! If you like Dostoevski, Turganev or Tolstoy, you love it. If you read Henry James, Thomas Hardy or George Eliot, you'll love it. If you have a taste for historical fiction, ideas and politics, you'll love it.
The great strength of Devils is its characters. Each person is motivated by an `ism (liberalism, feudalism, atheism, nihilism, socialism, etc) which posses him or her like a demon, but they are not flat types or puppets. All the main players are fully drawn flesh and blood people. They have quirks and contradictions that make them completely real. You may not like these people, but they will fascinate you.
There's not much plot in Demons. But so do a lot of superb novels: Zorba the Greek, Pale Fire, and David Copperfield, for example. Mark Twain admits Huck Finn has no plot, it's a series of escapades. Jake goes fishing, Brett picks bad men--that's The Sun Also Rises.
The dramatic momentum of Demons comes from your own attempts to find a plot in the tensions between the characters (and literally in plotting of the plodding conspirators). Something is definitely going on, you're just never sure what. Part One feels very much like a typical Victorian novel. Men talk at their club. Women jockey for social gain. Rumors fly about linking and relinking the young people into love affairs and scandals. And then just below the surface, the (rather thick) narrator suddenly and nonchalantly exposes a mirroring network of links more sinister than social and anarchic than romantic. As these develop the machinations of the story move from marriage to murder. In this Dostoevski cleverly captures the reader in the same web of dread and paranoia that grips the characters. So it is the interplay of forces, the murkiness and dread that make Demons a page-turner. It's marvelous to experience
Here's something else rarely mentioned: Dostoevski had a great sense of humor. There are a number of great comic scenes, gags and zippy one-liners. It's not his popular image, but old Teddy D was a funny guy. This translation (Pavear & Volokhonsky) is very successful at bringing out the humor and rendering into English the zestiness of the dialogue.
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Translation not for the finicky by Toni Mack (United States)  1 Stars
November 30, 2009
The following sentences are typical in this translation. If they don't bother you, then this translation probably won't irk you as it did me.
1. "Shatov listened frowningly and spitefully."
2. "Everyone started, as it were."
3. "Pyotr Stepanovich was silent and bore himself somehow with unusual gravity."
4. "She seemed somehow happy beyond measure."
5. "He did rise a little, somehow suddenly, with some strange movement in his face."
Here are the problems these cause me:
1. I can imagine saying, writing, or doing something spiteful. But listening is a passive act. How does a person "listen spitefully"?
2. What does "as it were" signify? I recently wrote in an email, "Thanks for listening, as it were." The recipient was reading, not listening; "as it were" signified that I knew as much, and used "listening" metaphorically. "Starting, as it were" - as in "being startled" - makes no sense.
3.-5. Similarly, I can't figure out what difference "somehow" makes to the action or emotion described. How is seeming happy different from seeming somehow happy? "Somehow" is the translators' favorite modifier, and I found it almost always mysterious. "Suddenly" is also fairly common; combined in 5 with "somehow" and "some strange movement in his face," it renders the sentence opaque to me.
These little mysteries irritated me so much that about halfway through, I took a pencil and began blacking out the infuriating modifiers. When that didn't help, I gave up altogether.
Most people aren't this fussy. If you share my foible, I suggest another translation.
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Not the Best, Far from His Worst by Time Traveler (USA)  4 Stars
November 14, 2009
Most people who have read multiple Dostoevsky texts know that his writing is extremely hit or miss, with Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov occupying his lowest and highest achievements respectively, in my own opinion of course. I found this novel to be somewhere in between. While this is Dostoevsky's most polemical novel, there are, as typical of his style, moments of genuine hilarity, such as when the old dandy Stepan Trofimovich runs away from home in search Russian peasant life, or when the the novelist Karmazinov (a vicious parody of Turgenev) tests his will over our narrator by casually dropping the little purse he carries only to see how quickly he'll rush to pick it up. At one point these two ridiculous old men are reunited amidst the middle of a scandal, and we imagine them trying to out-lisp one another in their conversation.
But it is a mucky novel, with a maddening amount of loose ends. As Richard Pevear notes in his introduction, Demons developed only after Dostoevsky combined two texts he was working on, sidetracking one project after becoming intensely interested in the Nechaev murder scandal. And the murder in this novel indeed comes so late in the novel that it seems by turns unnecessary, as if Dostoevsky merely needed to throw it into the plot to satisfy his polemics. One reviewers complains about the animated references of crooked smiles and characters going pale, but if you've read additional Dostoevsky texts you know that his realism is insanely contradictory - a writer who at once penetrated the human psyche like none before him and yet his characters are so often caricature-like (this, along with forced sentimentality the reason Vladimir Nabokov never missed an opportunity to trash this great writer). I think Bakhtin offered the best defense of the spirit of Dostoevsky's characters. Regardless, that's not the problem. The issue is the disjointed flow of the narrative, some of which is intentional to heighten this sense that gossip and rumours are fueling this town's sense of itself. Still, nothing quite redeems it. Even Joseph Frank, the foremost Dostoevsky scholar probably in any country, proclaimed the denouement "lame."
Lastly, to this talk of university politics, I always find the popular prejudices directed at colleges and universities amusing. I find that in many ways it exposes individuals who are either not familiar with the system, or far removed from it themselves. I actually first read this in a college class, and yes we openly discussed the conservative philosophies espoused. To compare this novel to modern discussions on communist vs. democratic models is unavoidable, and yes, Dostoevsky's vision of the extremes that would arise was true and yes, even prophetic. Notice also Shigalyov's conflict between absolute despotism and utopia, and the need to sometimes eliminate those who would inhibit the future paradise. Dostoevsky seems to have even foreseen the future genocide of the 20th century. However, to cite this novel in reference to the majority of contemporary liberal vs. conservative debates is ridiculous. Does anyone seriously believe this author would side with western capitalism and materialism? Russia's greatest Slavophile? It also serves to miss the extremes of some of these views. Dostoevsky does not promote Christianity. He promotes Eastern Orthodoxy specifically. Is it the character Shatov who opines that Roman Catholicism is worse even than atheism? And this is to say nothing of the classic Dostoevskian anti-semitism imparted by way of the repulsive Lyamshin, who entertains the town's social circle by mimicking the cries of a baby being born.
In the end, while I don't find this to be one of Dostoevsky's stronger novels, I would still recommend it, if only to capture the true degree to which this writer was able to foresee the future flow of human history, and the perils of radical philosophies (regardless of their affiliation!). Joseph Frank was right to anoint him a prophet. I would also recommend reading Pevear's introduction twice, once when you begin and again after finishing the novel. I think he hits the money: the demons in this novel are not people, they are ideas. Luke 8:32-36 is chosen as the epigraph, recounting the exorcism of demons from a sick man, with Christ giving them leave to enter the nearby herd of swine instead. Unfortunately for Russia, the pigs never made their way to the cliff's edge.
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A Polemical Treasure by D. F. Whipple (Bucks County, PA USA) 5 Stars
December 28, 2008
Seldom do writers come as close to prophesy as Dostoevsky does in this sensational and provocative attack on his leftist contemporaries. Ripped from the headlines of the 1860s, Demons captures, examines and ultimately condemns the radical forces that were set to devour millions of Russia souls in the early 20th century. Dostoevsky matches his contempt for these foes of Slavic society with an unswerving and vicious sense of humor, and in doing so, creates one of the truly great masterpieces of world literature.
The novel's chaotic, however. Moreover, it's slow to develop and even a structural mess, insofar as "the proper structure of a novel" goes, and like Melville, Dostoevsky feels free to introduce characters only to discard them at will. But as I read through this wild tale, the lucidity of the writer's intent, the drama, and the outrageous sense of parody--all of this felt improvisational, live and "in the moment"--more than compensated for Dostoevsky's fuzzy story arc.
It's a literary roast. That's why America's far left ideologues, so powerful in academic and literati circles, shun it; the truth hurts when it's unpleasant and it's aimed at you.
My Titles
Shadow Fields
Snooker Glen
Dasha
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Godless Radicals Get Their Due by southpaw68 (florida)  3 Stars
December 11, 2008
Demons is an okay read that goes on "forever". After 450 pages, the plot finally begins to warm up after a riot starts over a truthful, amusing, rabble-rousing speech at a society dame's ball. After this event, murders among radicals occur because they do not want anyone snitching on them for passing out illegal political tracts which will get them put on a cattle car straight to a Siberian prison camp for dissidents. Before that, we go from parlor to parlor and it's all talk, talk, talk that seems pointless.
Dostoyevsky enjoys skewering the radical chic of the "limousine liberals" of his day. -- Are they truly sincere in their beliefs or do they just hold "fashionable opinions" as a pretty façade? A silly rich couple represents these types of liberals, Stephan Trofinovich and Varvara Petrovna. Stephan is an effeminate, lightheaded, third-rate, intellectual has-been who enjoys spicing up his native tongue with French phrases to prove his pedigree. In the end, he gives up his godless ways and returns to godly sanity on his deathbed. "Demons" refer to those who have become "possessed" by diabolical, radical ideas which drive them to insanity, amorality, and mayhem.
The author also likes to poke fun at the propriety of an upper class woman named Yulia Michailnova. She attempts to sympathize with radicals to keep them from going over the edge, but is mortified with shame when a ball she gives is ruined by rabblerousing speeches that cause a scene and damage her reputation as a society dame. Another funny scene in which good manners and propriety are broken is when an old general is actually pulled by the nose by a young man after he uses his frequent insincere expression "Well, I will be pulled by the nose".
Pyotr Stepanovich is an implacable, amoral radical who cynically manipulates other radicals to kill potential informers to keep the cause going and to keep them from prison. He is like a devil that uses ideology to cover for the suffering he likes to create for its own sake.
Of course with Dostoyevsky, the godless radicals get their due by death by their own hand or someone else's, or by imprisonment. He could not see that life could be meaningful or moral without God. Without God, radical nihilism and mayhem rear their ugly heads.
The names in the novel keep changing for the same character and there are a lot of characters to keep up with. This leads to confusion as to who is who and what they did or said, so it is hard to follow the plot. It takes a long time to figure out what the author's point is. The novel is too long. I guess the upper class had a lot of time to talk and read in the author's era, so that is why the book is so long. You may need a good professor to walk you through this novel.
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