Demons is undoubtedly the most suffocating novel of Fyodor M.

Dostoevsky: 900 pages of

spiritual darkness, anger and despair, crimes and suicides, a despair carried to the ultimate
limits of the bearable. A kind of boiler in the lead that boils all mankind. Little light all around
and barely flickering, hope nowhere. In addition to those "of ours" from the Demons, the Idiot
Lichens gang is a happy kindergarten: their morals are rotten, but no ideology, no system of
organizing crimes, no ferocious nihilism, no lie planning. In this vortex of evil, a friendship, a
love, a sweetness or a mist of compassion cannot penetrate. "People closed universes".

As in the other great novels of the author, you are again amazed by the monumentality, (but
also the accuracy) of the writing, the unequaled ability to maintain at long the narrative pace at
paroxysmal levels without leaving for a moment the feeling of "forced" or " exaggerated ", by
the refined pendulum between the posture of narrator-witness and that of narrator-
omniscient, of contracting and dilating the space, of placing intermediates just before the
climax (under the pretext of further explanations), with the masked effect of amplifying the
tension , from the scenes that, when it does not end completely otherwise than you could
foresee, prepare and announce the imminent explosion from a later scene, of this montaigne-
russe (!) madman between the mystic and the underdog.

In the Demons, it seems that no one is resting, no one is meditating. Devastating through the
roll of action the novel has an exemplary upward unfolding of the forms of speech. The very
numerous dialogues, whose force vectors are mainly Piotr Verhovenski, Nikolai Stavroghin,
Kirillov and Şatov, are complemented during the novel by a series of "conferences"
(Karmazinov, Stepan Trofimovici), of "meetings" (anthological) first meeting of the "group"), of
beliefs, beliefs and unbeliefs shouted everywhere. All this leads, essentially, to the final
confession, to Stavroghin's confession - "at Tihon", which no longer has the saving dimension of
Crime and Punishment, but one of diagnosing evil: Stavroghin's only obstacle is Tihon, the only
stop. of sin is the cruel truth that the monk puts before him.
However, the monopoly of authentic lies belongs to the "demons". Who are these? A herd of
socialist-nihilist-anarchist-revolutionaries, who present the following identification data .
Piotr Verhovenski, their absolute leader, has four main characteristics: a cult for uniform and
function, sentimentality - an attribute that does not exclude the appetite for scam and, most
importantly - "the main force, the cement that encloses everything, is afraid of having a
personal opinion ".
Their boss, "murderer by profession and clown by vocation" - Piotr Stepanovici Verhovenski,
master over a huge gear of the imposture, it is recommended: "neither stupid nor clever, quite
modestly gifted and fallen from the moon". The working technique (perfect, nothing to object):
the slaughter of the word (before the slaughter of people) by abundant speech, rumor and
gossip, used with accuracy: "But why do I speak a lot, with many words and never reach my
goal? I do not know how to speak. Those who are able to speak express themselves concisely. "
Essentially, a crook, not an ideologue, builder of pseudodialectic scaffolds on the basis of a
"golden mediocrity", assumed, aware and above all, self-satisfied. In front of such an exemplar,
it becomes revealing the stump stupidity is not a chapter of psychology, but of Revelation".
With all his passion, Piotr Verhovenski remains long behind Nikolai Vsevolodovici Stavroghin.
He cannot equal his intelligence, nor his attitude, he cannot overcome him for better or for
worse. Under his gaze, always cold, Verhovensky seems a plagiarized plagiarist. Stravroghin is
an abyss in which no character other than Tihon can penetrate. It has been said about him that
his task is much harder than other Dostoevsky characters (Raskolnikov or Ivan Karamazov), who
were able to find at one point a saving landmark from which to start their rebirth.
Dostoevsky is undoubtedly a parent of classical prose, a lampoonist
of erosion and human sin, disguised as the face of vicious demons. Reading the novel is a
delight for the versed readers, finding in the novel careful descriptions, human studies and
high-caliber morality.