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Demons (Penguin Classics)

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Despite this 'madness', it is 'rationality' that is emphasized in the narrator's description of the suicide itself. Unfettered by fear or morality, his life has become a self-centred experiment and a heartless quest to overcome the torment of his growing ennui. However, despite giving freedom to his imagination, Dostoevsky took great pains to derive the novel's characters and story from real people and real ideas of the time.

They take him to their village where he meets Sofya Matveyevna, a travelling gospel seller, and he firmly attaches himself to her. Unsurprisingly, Lenin hated Dostoevsky and regarded him as a loathsome reactionary (Stalin and Trotsky appreciated him more).The main participants seclude themselves, with the exception of Pyotr Stepanovich who actively insinuates himself into the social life of the town. Liza becomes engaged to her cousin Mavriky Nikolaevich, but remains fixated on Stavrogin even after he openly acknowledges his marriage. He is utterly dependent on Varvara Petrovna financially and she frequently rescues him from the consequences of his irresponsibility. They are on the point of mutiny until Pyotr Stepanovich shows them Lebyadkin's letter to Von Lembke.

Liberal figures like Stepan Trofimovich, Varvara Petrovna, Liputin, Karmazinov, and the Von Lembkes, and minor authority figures like the old Governor Osip Osipovich and the over-zealous policeman Flibusterov, are parodies of a variety of establishment types that Dostoevsky held partially responsible for the excesses of the radical generation. In the din that breaks out after their departure, the strongest voice is that of Pyotr Stepanovich, and he manages to persuade Varvara Petrovna to listen to his explanation for what has occurred. A hint is given when Varvara Petrovna asks the mentally disturbed Marya, who has approached her outside church, if she is Lebyadkina and she replies that she is not.His first book, Poor Folk, did very well but on 23rd April 1849 he was arrested for subversion and sentenced to death. He receives payments for her care from Stavrogin, but he mistreats her and squanders the money on himself. Varvara Petrovna suddenly conceives the idea of forming an engagement between Stepan Trofimovich and Dasha.

He had the beginnings of a career as a lecturer at the University, and for a short time was a prominent figure among the exponents of the 'new ideas' that were beginning to influence Russian cultural life. When he was a child she took him and his sister Darya Pavlovna under her protection, and they received tutoring from Stepan Trofimovich. According to Shatov, Stavrogin is driven by "a passion for inflicting torment", not merely for the pleasure of harming others, but to torment his own conscience and wallow in the sensation of "moral carnality". Towards the end of the book, he realises his own personal responsibility for the rise of nihilistic ideas among the new generation, and publicly denounces and renounces his cursed progeny at a literary fete organised by Yulia Mihailovna for the purposes of bringing together the old and the new generation of radicals, in the hope of increasing her own power and prestige. The plot centres around a gang of revolutionary students, whose rejection of official Russia in favour of revolutionary ideas leads to their downfall and the corruption and degradation of the entire community in which they live.

Kirillov sums up Stavrogin's dilemma thus: "If Stavrogin believes, then he doesn't believe that he believes. Shatov, during a spell abroad in America, breaks with the revolutionary circle led by the wily and fanatical Pyotr Stepanovich Verhovensky, and becomes a Russian nationalist and Slavophile under the influence of Stavrogin (who simultaneously encourages another character, Kirillov, to become a nihilist).

Though very conscious of his own erudition, higher ideals and superior aesthetic sensibilities, Stepan Trofimovich doesn't actually seem to do anything at all in the scholarly sense. Of Pyotr Verkhovensky, Dostoevsky said that the character is not a portrait of Nechayev but that "my aroused mind has created by imagination the person, the type, that corresponds to the crime. In the end, one still has some affection for those we left behind – affection that can lead us back into the grasp of the group.Pyotr Stepanovich adopts a similarly destabilizing approach toward his father, driving Stepan Trofimovich into a frenzy by relentlessly ridiculing him and further undermining his disintegrating relationship with Varvara Petrovna. Stavrogin replies that it might be possible to say yes to him if only he were not such a buffoon, and tells him to come back tomorrow. If God does not exist" according to Kirillov, "then all will is mine, and I am obliged to proclaim self-will. Shatov, like myself and so many other cult members in real life, experiences in America a weakening of the ‘milieu control’ of the group.

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