Dostoevsky: Demons discussion

Find the full essay here .

Below I copied and pasted the first 1/4th of the essay.

"Tragic Rites in Dostoevsky's The Possessed"

By Joyce Carol Oates
Originally published in The Georgia Review, Fall 1978; Reprinted in Contraries.

Somehow it has happened—no one knows quite how, or why—that the incidence of violence and robbery has doubled. Arsonists’ fires have ravaged towns and villages, and in some places there is even disease: plague, and the threat of a cholera epidemic. The manager of a factory in the town of Shpigulin has shamelessly cheated the workers, and working conditions are very poor; subversive leaflets have appeared, urging the overthrow of the existing order; the idle, prankish company that routinely gathers in the Governor’s mansion is becoming involved in adventures of an increasingly reckless kind. (They are called the Jeerers or the Tormentors.) The historic Church of the Nativity of Our Lady is plundered and a live mouse left behind the broken glass of the icon. Fedka, the escaped convict, a former serf who was sold into the army, many years before, in order to pay his master’s gambling debt, roams the countryside committing crimes—not just robbery but arson and murder as well. The police seem unable to find him. “Strange characters” appear—a human flotsam that comes out of nowhere to plague society. Madmen erupt. Women become obsessed with feminism. Generals transform themselves into lawyers, divinity students speak out rudely, poets dress themselves in peasant costumes. The son of the province’s most wealthy landowner has contracted a marriage in jest, it would seem, after a night of drinking—with a woman of the very lowest social order, who is both lame and demented. A nineteen-year-old boy has committed suicide and a party of pleasure-seekers crowds into the room to examine him: one of the ladies says, “I’m so bored with everything that I can’t afford to be too fussy about entertainment—anything will do as long as it’s amusing.” It seems that a number of people in the area have taken to hanging and shooting themselves. Is the ground suddenly starting to slip from beneath our feet? Is the great country of Russia as a whole approaching a crisis? Demons begin to appear, licking like flames about the foundations of order; a Trickster-Demon springs out of nowhere and, very much like the gloating Dionysus of Euripides’ The Bacchae, wants only to sow disruption, madness, and death. “We shall proclaim destruction,” Peter Verkhovensky tells his idol Stavrogin, “because—because . . . the idea is so attractive for some reason! And anyway, we need some exercise.

The Possessed, Dostoyevsky’s most confused and violent novel, and his most satisfactorily “tragic” work, began to appear in serial form in 1871, close after the publication of The Idiot, and only a few years after the publication of Crime and Punishment in 1867. All of Dostoyevsky’s great novels show a family resemblance, just as his marvelous operatic characters are obviously kin and might, without much difficulty, stride from one novel to another; but the demonic excesses of The Possessed seem to have sprung from the “plague” of which Raskolnikov dreams at the very conclusion of Crime and Punishment, when he is imprisoned in Siberia, a confessed but not truly repentant murderer. In a delirium Raskolnikov dreams that the world is condemned to a new plague from Asia, and that everyone is to be destroyed except a very few. The disease attacks men by way of their sanity: though mad, each believes that he alone has the truth and is estranged from his fellows. They cannot decide what is “evil,” they do not know whom to blame, and they kill one another out of senseless spite, as the infection spreads. “Only a few men could be saved,” Raskolnikov dreams. “They were a pure chosen people, destined to found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth, but no one had seen these men, no one had heard their words and their voices.”

So in The Possessed madness is loosed. Society approaches a crisis: the classes freely intermingle in the Governor’s mansion; the fires burn; ludicrous “revolutionary” theorizing gives way to action; the Fairy-Tale Prince, Stavrogin, commits suicide; and his spiritual father, his former tutor Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, strikes out upon the road in a futile, desperate pilgrimage to “find Russia,” and also dies. ...