We were silent again for a minute. “Cher,” he concluded at last, getting up quickly, “do you know this is bound to end in something?” “Of course,” said I. “Vous ne comprenez pas. Passons. But … usually in our world things come to nothing, but this will end in something; it’s bound to, it’s bound to!”
Summary
Dostoyevsky chose as the epigraph to this story the passage of Luke where Jesus sends the demons into the swine, and they subsequently throw themselves off a cliff. A curious passage, and one that will come up over and over in this book. I won’t bother to write a plot summary because spoilers, and also like all of Dostoyevsky’s books, the plot is the tortilla of the burrito. It serves mainly to deliver the contents of the book. The contents are the conversations. The characters are unforgettable, you have a fifty-year-old child, who was influential once, but is of no practical use and literally runs away from home. You have Stavrogin, a man who can’t bring himself to believe in anything, but apparently can’t stop influencing people with the force of his ideas. You have the power-hungry revolutionary sociopath Pyotr Stepanovich who is always willing to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Last but not least, one of the most compelling characters Kirillov, the atheists par excellence, consumed by an idea, courageous, selfless, and ultimately doomed. In short, this work is a literary masterpiece that managed to divine the future of Russia with astonishing clarity.
Thoughts
The first difficulty that must be surmounted with this book is the long list of characters. The list is multiplied by the Russian’s propensity to use different surnames, and nicknames so the fifteen or so major characters can be referred to by around 45 names. I often was looking up a character list sheet to try and keep the web of relations straight, but even so it took a while to get to know the cast. One of the most interesting things to me about Dostoyevsky is that he can make the most salacious events play second fiddle to dialogue. Patricide, a city on fire, an old woman killed by an axe. All of these things do happen in his novels, but they are almost forgotten. It is their psychological footprint that leaves its mark in the memory. I have not read a lot about Dostoyevsky’s life, but to me his books are an incarnation of his own psychological struggles, that is an attempt to answer this question:
God is necessary, and therefore must exist… But I know that he does not and cannot exist… Don’t you understand that a man with these two thoughts cannot go on living?
I think his stories go beyond imagination, to produce this one must have lived it. I have been thinking recently of reason and rationality, they are often referred to as a light, but what if the light is profane? Here the story of the demons and the pigs, represent the various ‘isms’ that come from around the world, possess their victims and ultimately led them to destruction. To Dostoyevsky there is something beyond reason, or rather something that reason passes by. The ‘Eternal Harmony’, again using Kirillov as a mouthpiece:
There are seconds, they come only five or six at a time, and you suddenly feel the presence of eternal harmony, fully achieved. It is nothing earthly; not that it’s heavenly, but man cannot endure it in his earthly state. One must change physically or die. The feeling is clear and indisputable. As if you suddenly sense the whole of nature and suddenly say: yes, this is true.
— As a footnote to this quote, I think this is the ‘oceanic’ feeling Freud refers to and admits to having never experienced in the opening of ‘Civilizations and Its Discontents’. This is the old divide that will always exist, reason and experience. One can experience something they can’t explain, and they can also explain something they will never and can never force themselves to experience. I use a quote here from a conversation between Kirillov and the novel’s narrator:
“Imagine”—he stopped before me—“imagine a stone as big as a great house; it hangs and you are under it; if it falls on you, on your head, will it hurt you?” “A stone as big as a house? Of course it would be fearful.” “I speak not of the fear. Will it hurt?” “A stone as big as a mountain, weighing millions of tons? Of course it wouldn’t hurt.” “But really stand there and while it hangs you will fear very much that it will hurt. The most learned man, the greatest doctor, all, all will be very much frightened. Every one will know that it won’t hurt, and every one will be afraid that it will hurt.”