Writer: Orhan Pamuk, Other Colours, Essays and a Story, Writings on Life, Art, Books and Cities
Demons is, in my view, the greatest political novel of all time. I first read it when I was twenty, and I can describe its impact only by saying I was stunned, awed, terrified, and utterly convinced. No other novel had affected me so deeply; no other story had given me such distressing knowledge of the human soul. Man’s will to power; his capacity for forgiveness; his ability to deceive himself and others; his love for, hatred of, and need for belief; his addictions, both sacred and profane – what shocked me was that Dostoyevsky saw all these qualities as existing together and rooted in a common tangled tale of politics, deception, and death. I admired the novel for the speed with which it conveyed its all-embracing wisdom. This may be literature’s primary virtue: Great novels draw us into their trance as fast as their heroes race into the thick of things; we believe in their worlds as deeply as we believe in their heroes. I believe in Dostoyevsky’s prophetic voice as ardently as I believed in his characters and in their addiction to confession.
What is harder to explain is why this book struck such fear in my heart. I was particularly affected by the excruciating suicide scene (the snuffing of the candle and the dark other, observing events from the next room) and by the violence of an ill-conceived murder born of terror. Perhaps what shook me was the speed with which the novel’s heroes switched back and forth between grand thoughts and their small provincial lives, a boldness Dostoyevsky saw not just in them but in himself. When we read this novel, it seems as if even the smallest details of ordinary life are tied to the characters’ grand thoughts, and it is by seeing such connections that we enter the fearful world of the paranoid, in which all thoughts and great ideals are linked to one another. So it is with the secret societies, intertwined cells, revolutionaries, and informers who inhabit this book. This fearsome world in which everyone is connected to everyone else serves both as a mask and a conduit to the great truth lurking behind all thoughts, for behind this world is another, and in this other world it is possible to question man’s freedom and God’s existence. In Demons, Dostoyevsky offers us a hero who commits suicide to confirm both these grand ideas – man’s freedom and God’s presence – and he does so in a way no reader is likely ever to forget. There are very few writers who can personify or dramatize beliefs, abstract thoughts, and philosophical contradictions as well as Dostoyevsky.
Dostoyevsky began work on Demons in 1869, at the age of forty-eight. He’d just written and published The Idiot; he’d written The Eternal Husband. He was living in Europe (Florence and Dresden), where he’d gone two years earlier to escape his creditors and work in relative peace. He had in mind a novel about faith and the lack of it, which he called Atheism, The Life of a Great Sinner. He was full of rancor for the Nihilists, whom we might define as half anarchist, half liberal, and he was writing a political novel that mocked their hatred of Russian traditions, their enthusiasm for the West, and their lack of faith. After working on this novel for some time, he began to lose interest in it and coincidentally became fired up (as only an exile can be) about a political murder that he read about in the Russian papers and also heard about from a friend of his wife’s. That same year a university student named Ivanov had been murdered by four friends who believed him to be a police informer. This revolutionary cell in which the youths were killing one another was headed by the brilliant, devious, devilish Nechayev. In Demons, it is Stefanovich Verhonevsky who serves as the Nechayev figure, and as in real life, he and his friends (Tolchenko, Virginski, Shigalev, and Lamshin) kill the suspected informer Shatov in a park and throw his body into a lake.
The murder allowed Dostoyevsky to look behind the revolutionary and utopian dreams of Russian Nihilists and Westernizers and to discover there a powerful desire for power – over our spouses, our friends, our surroundings, our entire world. And so, when as a young leftist I read Demons, it seemed to me that the story was not about Russia a hundred years earlier but about Turkey, which had succumbed to a radical politics deeply rooted in violence. It was as if Dostoyevsky was whispering into my ear, teaching me the secret language of the soul, pulling me into a society of radicals who, though inflamed by dreams of changing the world, were also locked into secret organizations and taken with the pleasure of deceiving others in the name of the revolution, damning and degrading those who did not speak their language or share their vision. I remember asking myself at the time why no one talked about the revelations in this book. It had so much to tell us about our own times, yet in leftist circles it was ignored, and that may be why, when I read it, the book seemed to be whispering a secret to me.
There was also a personal reason for my fears. For at the time, in other worlds, about a hundred years after the Nechayev murder and the publication of Demons – a similar crime was perpetrated in Turkey, at Robert college. A revolutionary cell to which a number of my classmates belonged became convinced (with the encouragement of a clever and devilish “hero” who then vanished into the mist)that one of their number was a traitor; they killed him one night by smashing his head with a cudgel, stuffed the body into a trunk – and were caught while taking it across Bosphorus in a rowboat. The idea that drove them, the idea that made them willing to go as far as murder, was that “the most dangerous enemy is the one closest to you, and that means the one who leaves first” – it was because I had read this first in Demons that I could feel it in my heart. Years later I asked a friend who’d been in this cell if he’d read Demons, whose plot they’d unwittingly imitated, but he had no interest in the novel whatsoever.
Though suffused with fear and violence, Demons is Dostoyevsky’s most amusing, most comic, novel. Dostoyevsky is a consummate satirist, especially on crowded sets. In Karmazinov, Dostoyevsky has created a biting caricature of Turgenev, for whom he felt both friendship and hatred in real life. Turgenev troubled Dostoyevsky by being a wealthy landowner who approved of the Nihilists and Westernizers and (in Dostoyevsky’s view) looked down on Russian culture. Demons is to some degree a novel he wrote as a way of arguing with Fathers and Sons.
But angry as he was at left-wing liberals and Westernizers, Dostoyevsky, knowing them from within, also could not help discussing them with affection from time to time. He writes of Stephan Trofimovich’s end – and of his meeting just the sort of Russian peasant he’d always dreamed of – with such heartfelt lyricism that the reader, who has been smirking at this man’s pretensions throughout the novel, cannot help but admire them. This could in some sense be seen as Dostoyevsky’s way of saying farewell to the Westernizing all-or-nothing revolutionary intellectual, dispatching him to indulge his passions, his mistakes and his pretensions in peace.
I have always seen Demons as a book that proclaims the shameful secrets that radical intellectuals (who live far from the center, on the edge of Europe, at war with their Western dreams and racked by doubts about God) wish to hide from us.
Photo Courtesy by Creative Commons license of Wikipedia
Demons is, in my view, the greatest political novel of all time. I first read it when I was twenty, and I can describe its impact only by saying I was stunned, awed, terrified, and utterly convinced. No other novel had affected me so deeply; no other story had given me such distressing knowledge of the human soul. Man’s will to power; his capacity for forgiveness; his ability to deceive himself and others; his love for, hatred of, and need for belief; his addictions, both sacred and profane – what shocked me was that Dostoyevsky saw all these qualities as existing together and rooted in a common tangled tale of politics, deception, and death. I admired the novel for the speed with which it conveyed its all-embracing wisdom. This may be literature’s primary virtue: Great novels draw us into their trance as fast as their heroes race into the thick of things; we believe in their worlds as deeply as we believe in their heroes. I believe in Dostoyevsky’s prophetic voice as ardently as I believed in his characters and in their addiction to confession.
What is harder to explain is why this book struck such fear in my heart. I was particularly affected by the excruciating suicide scene (the snuffing of the candle and the dark other, observing events from the next room) and by the violence of an ill-conceived murder born of terror. Perhaps what shook me was the speed with which the novel’s heroes switched back and forth between grand thoughts and their small provincial lives, a boldness Dostoyevsky saw not just in them but in himself. When we read this novel, it seems as if even the smallest details of ordinary life are tied to the characters’ grand thoughts, and it is by seeing such connections that we enter the fearful world of the paranoid, in which all thoughts and great ideals are linked to one another. So it is with the secret societies, intertwined cells, revolutionaries, and informers who inhabit this book. This fearsome world in which everyone is connected to everyone else serves both as a mask and a conduit to the great truth lurking behind all thoughts, for behind this world is another, and in this other world it is possible to question man’s freedom and God’s existence. In Demons, Dostoyevsky offers us a hero who commits suicide to confirm both these grand ideas – man’s freedom and God’s presence – and he does so in a way no reader is likely ever to forget. There are very few writers who can personify or dramatize beliefs, abstract thoughts, and philosophical contradictions as well as Dostoyevsky.
Dostoyevsky began work on Demons in 1869, at the age of forty-eight. He’d just written and published The Idiot; he’d written The Eternal Husband. He was living in Europe (Florence and Dresden), where he’d gone two years earlier to escape his creditors and work in relative peace. He had in mind a novel about faith and the lack of it, which he called Atheism, The Life of a Great Sinner. He was full of rancor for the Nihilists, whom we might define as half anarchist, half liberal, and he was writing a political novel that mocked their hatred of Russian traditions, their enthusiasm for the West, and their lack of faith. After working on this novel for some time, he began to lose interest in it and coincidentally became fired up (as only an exile can be) about a political murder that he read about in the Russian papers and also heard about from a friend of his wife’s. That same year a university student named Ivanov had been murdered by four friends who believed him to be a police informer. This revolutionary cell in which the youths were killing one another was headed by the brilliant, devious, devilish Nechayev. In Demons, it is Stefanovich Verhonevsky who serves as the Nechayev figure, and as in real life, he and his friends (Tolchenko, Virginski, Shigalev, and Lamshin) kill the suspected informer Shatov in a park and throw his body into a lake.
The murder allowed Dostoyevsky to look behind the revolutionary and utopian dreams of Russian Nihilists and Westernizers and to discover there a powerful desire for power – over our spouses, our friends, our surroundings, our entire world. And so, when as a young leftist I read Demons, it seemed to me that the story was not about Russia a hundred years earlier but about Turkey, which had succumbed to a radical politics deeply rooted in violence. It was as if Dostoyevsky was whispering into my ear, teaching me the secret language of the soul, pulling me into a society of radicals who, though inflamed by dreams of changing the world, were also locked into secret organizations and taken with the pleasure of deceiving others in the name of the revolution, damning and degrading those who did not speak their language or share their vision. I remember asking myself at the time why no one talked about the revelations in this book. It had so much to tell us about our own times, yet in leftist circles it was ignored, and that may be why, when I read it, the book seemed to be whispering a secret to me.
There was also a personal reason for my fears. For at the time, in other worlds, about a hundred years after the Nechayev murder and the publication of Demons – a similar crime was perpetrated in Turkey, at Robert college. A revolutionary cell to which a number of my classmates belonged became convinced (with the encouragement of a clever and devilish “hero” who then vanished into the mist)that one of their number was a traitor; they killed him one night by smashing his head with a cudgel, stuffed the body into a trunk – and were caught while taking it across Bosphorus in a rowboat. The idea that drove them, the idea that made them willing to go as far as murder, was that “the most dangerous enemy is the one closest to you, and that means the one who leaves first” – it was because I had read this first in Demons that I could feel it in my heart. Years later I asked a friend who’d been in this cell if he’d read Demons, whose plot they’d unwittingly imitated, but he had no interest in the novel whatsoever.
Though suffused with fear and violence, Demons is Dostoyevsky’s most amusing, most comic, novel. Dostoyevsky is a consummate satirist, especially on crowded sets. In Karmazinov, Dostoyevsky has created a biting caricature of Turgenev, for whom he felt both friendship and hatred in real life. Turgenev troubled Dostoyevsky by being a wealthy landowner who approved of the Nihilists and Westernizers and (in Dostoyevsky’s view) looked down on Russian culture. Demons is to some degree a novel he wrote as a way of arguing with Fathers and Sons.
But angry as he was at left-wing liberals and Westernizers, Dostoyevsky, knowing them from within, also could not help discussing them with affection from time to time. He writes of Stephan Trofimovich’s end – and of his meeting just the sort of Russian peasant he’d always dreamed of – with such heartfelt lyricism that the reader, who has been smirking at this man’s pretensions throughout the novel, cannot help but admire them. This could in some sense be seen as Dostoyevsky’s way of saying farewell to the Westernizing all-or-nothing revolutionary intellectual, dispatching him to indulge his passions, his mistakes and his pretensions in peace.
I have always seen Demons as a book that proclaims the shameful secrets that radical intellectuals (who live far from the center, on the edge of Europe, at war with their Western dreams and racked by doubts about God) wish to hide from us.
Photo Courtesy by Creative Commons license of Wikipedia
0 Comments