Demons

This is the first reference to Demons in Dostoevsky's correspondence, and we can see the novel begi

News about the crime began to appear in the Russian and foreign press about a month after it was committed, and while it certainly would have attracted Dostoevsky's notice in any case, the name and activities of Nechaev had come to his attention even earlier. It so happened that Dostoevsky's young brother-in-law, Ivan Snitkin, was a student in this very Academy and had been visiting with the Dostoevskys in the fall of 1869. Dostoevsky's wife, A

What Dostoevsky learned from these newspapers confirmed some of his worst fears, which had become particularly exacerbated during his self-imposed European exile, about the disintegrating effect that the Western-imported ideas of the Russian Nihilism of the 1860s was exercising on the moral fibre of Russian society. Sergei Nechaev, whose extraordinary force of personality seemed to exercise a hypnotic effect on all those who knew him, had carried the Utilitarian component of 'rational egoism' to its farthest extreme by advocating a total Machiavellianism — one which included, not only deception and falsity against one's enemies, but also against friends and allies if this became necessary for the cause. In his own case, Nechaev created a completely false myth about himself as having been arrested, and then accomplishing the unprecedented feat of escaping from the Peter-and-Paul fortress (where Dostoevsky himself had once been imprisoned). When Nechaev contacted the veteran revolutionaries Mikhail Bakunin and Nikolai Ogarev in Geneva, enveloped in the aureole of his supposed exploits, he represented himself as the delegate of a powerful and perfectly fictitious underground organization; and Pyotr Verkhovensky presents himself in the same fashion to the awed members of his revolutionary cell, as well as to all those assembled in the superb scene in which 'the progressives' of the town gather for a meeting. Dostoevsky read Nechaev's blood-curdling Catechism of a Revolutionary (probably written in collaboration with Bakunin), only after the first part of Demons had already appeared. But he was convinced that he had nonetheless created a character, Pyotr Verkhovensky, who embodied all the unscrupulousness and ruthlessness of its precepts, and the Catechism itself, though perhaps adding a few extra details, only helped to confirm his creation. Pyotr Verkhovensky, he told Katkov, does not resemble the real-life Nechaev in any way, but 'my aroused mind has created by imagination the person, the type, that really corresponds to the crime'. The image of this type, however, did not emerge all at once, but underwent a crucial metamorphosis as the writing of the book proceeded.

Pyotr Verkhovensky is a product of the ideology of the 1860s, and the members of this generation, almost from the very start, had defined themselves in opposition to the generation of the 1840s (to which Dostoevsky himself belonged). This conflict of generations had been brilliantly depicted in Turgenev's Fathers and Children, a novel that Dostoevsky greatly admired, and in which the main younger character, a medical student named Bazarov, treated members of the older generation with a pitying and condescending contempt. He had no tolerance at all for their high-minded Romantic and idealistic velleities, even though these had played a part in helping to abolish serfdom and had led to a more humanitarian attitude toward the peasantry. But Bazarov had no patience with exalted sentiment of any kind, including that expressed in art, and proclaimed himself a Nihilist who believed nothing except what could be established through science and materialism (he spends a good part of his time dissecting frogs).

This opposition between the generations, so indelibly portrayed by Turgenev, also gave rise to a whole series of polemical exchanges throughout the mid-1860s to which Dostoevsky paid the closest attention, and on which he drew for his own novel. In 1867, he quarrelled personally with Turgenev, at least in part because of an anti-Russian tirade in Turgenev's novel, Smoke; and in the course of their heated exchange of unpleasantries, he advised his fellow novelist to acquire a telescope so that he could see Russia more clearly from the latter's European residence. In reporting on this incident to Maikov, Dostoevsky already anticipates the clash of generations as he would later present it. 'The difference [between the generations]' he wrote, 'is that Chernyshevsky's followers simply criticize Russia openly and wish for its collapse,' while the older radicals of the 1840s like Turgenev, who are 'Belinsky's offspring, [Belinsky was the greatest literary critic of the 1840s, a political radical and Westernizer] add that they love Russia.' (italics in text) The tragi-comic quarrel between Pyotr and his father, the marvellously delineated Stepan Trofimovich, whom Dostoevsky both pillories and glorifies at the same time, is already implicit in these words.

Once having decided to write a topical novel, Dostoevsky started by reworking some of his old notes in which embryonic images of his later characters already appear. There is a Romantic poet who calls himself 'a pagan' and 'deifies nature' (Stepan Trofimovich); there is a lame girl, whose father is a drunken lieutenant, and 'who goes begging in a noble fashion' (Captain Lebyadkin and his lame sister Marya); there is also the begi