Something Some of The Time: Dostoyevsky's The Devils

Quotes concerning Ivan Shatov

I started reading Dostoyevsky’s The Devils (The Possessed; Demons), in early December and finished the book at the beginning of February. It’s been a bit of a slog if I’m honest – certainly book takes it’s time building up momentum, seeming to be undecided for some time on who or what the main plot was going to be about.

As David Magarshacks’ Translator’s Introduction points out, after a significant episode in the Russian radical movements at the time,

“Dostoyevsky [was forced] to introduce a great number of vital changes in his novel, although the first part of it had already been published in The Russian Messenger [...]

“This slipshod method of writing his ‘tendentious’ novel made it into one of the most structurally untidy of Dostoyevsky’s great novels” (p. xii)

Though only having read a couple of Dostoyevsky’s novels I would agree that The Devils is indeed “structurally untidy”. Despite this I became, over the months I spent with the book, utterly engrossed in its world.

It builds for the reader this amazing community of characters who all, at some point in the plot, seem conflicted about their feelings and ideas. Even the auxiliary characters are full of conflict. This brings a great deal of depth to the novel – which, for me, was primarily about people rather than politics; or rather how people deal with political ideologies in their lives – on a social, emotional and physical level.

There were, admittedly, some ideas which I disagree with within the book. Certain characters come across strongly as caricatures of what Dostoyevsky believed – that is the political radicals are all either pathetic, manipulative, or downright evil. In terms of plot, also, I very much lost interest in one strand – which feels arbitrary by the end of the novel and only maintained on the grounds of continuity – however, there are moments which are just electric! The characters Peter Verkhovensky and Nicolas Stavrogin’s encounters with each other are brilliant (clearly a great job here done by Magarshacks – though I’m not sure how more recent translations read). Additionally the character of Shatov has a brilliant arc and I found myself increasingly invested in him (all credit to D.’s ability build drama – and M.’s ability to translate it.)

Towards the end of the novel as the plot reaches some kind of conclusion there is also a very dramatic moment of climax in which a group of characters just explode! It’s some of the best character work I’ve ever read! It’s dark and ridiculous –and just amazing!

I don’t have the notes to really ‘review’ this work. I have however included some drawings I made of some characters and the scene I mention above. These are (clearly) sketches (I do not profess to be an illustrator), though I feel the sketchiness conveys the torment a lot of these characters go through in the course of the book. Verkhovensky is included in two of the drawings, but appears very differently in them – this is down to my formal inability to capture likeness, but also they were drawn about a month apart when I was at different moments in the novel.