Demons

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 beginning of a political plot. 'Nechaev, Kulishov had denounced Nechaev ... The police enter and capture [presumably Nechaev].' Dostoevsky also sketches a romantic rivalry between a Prince, 'a pathetic figure', and a Schoolteacher, obviously a moral exemplar; both are competing for the affections of a young girl called the Ward (Darya Shatov), who has been raised by the Prince's mother (Mme Stavrogin).When the Prince seduces the Ward, the mother wants to marry her off to the Schoolteacher with a dowry; but he refuses the dowry and becomes her friend instead. This plot intrigue, provisonally entitled Envy, ends with the Prince marrying the Ward because he wishes to emulate the superior moral qualities of the Teacher.

There are also some other features of these early notes that foreshadow the final text. The locale of the action is set in a populous provincial society ('a large group gathered in the rural countryside'), and this somnolent and lethargic world has become infiltrated and undermined by Nihilist ideas. Nihilist ideas are being spread by 'a neighbor ... very wealthy, and with students'; even the morally positive Teacher is 'a Nihilist up to a point, does not believe'. One may see him as a protoype of the later Shatov, also a figure of sterling moral purity and wrestling with the problem of religious faith. Just how these two themes - the romantic and the political - will be interwoven is by no means clear; but the way forward is indicated by another note: 'Proclamations. Fugitive appearance of Nechaev, to kill the Teacher(?).' Dostoevsky's question mark indicates his uncertainty as yet, but he has introduced a political murder that intersects with the sentimental intrigue of Envy, and this is the path that he will continue to follow, interweaving the private and the political ever more closely as he goes along. His next task is to integrate this plot structure with the ideological conflict-of-generations theme that will provide his novel with so much of its satirical bite.

An important aid in this task was a review article that N. N. Strakhov had written the year before about a recent biography of T. N. Granovsky, a liberal historian who had enjoyed a brief moment of fame in the 1840s. Strakhov had defined him as 'a pure Westernizer', who had sympathized with everything that was 'sublime and beautiful' in European culture, but who, like all the others of the same stripe, had nonetheless been one of the forefathers of the Russian Nihilism that the surviving members of this generation had since been denouncing. Indeed, the detestation was reciprocal, 'and the Nihilist children themselves have now taken to renouncing their fathers'. Whether Dostoevsky recalled this article, or had it at hand, it certainly inspired a note labelled ' T. M Granovsky ... a pure and idealistic Westernizer,' whose 'aimlessness and lack of firmness in his views ... which ... used to cause him suffering before ... have now become his second nature (his son makes fun of this tendency).' (italics in text) Dostoevsky wrote to Strakhov asking him to dispatch a copy of the book about Granovsky as quickly as possible, and in a later letter explains: 'I wish to speak out about several matters even though my artistry goes smash. What attracts me is what has piled up in my mind and heart; let it give only a pamphlet, but I shall speak out.'

Once Granovsky had become the prototype of the character representing the 1840s, Dostoevsky could imagine him very clearly and concretely. 'Places himself unconsciously on a pedestal, in the style of relics to be worshipped by pilgrims, and loves it ... Shuns Nihilism and does not understand it ... 'Leave me God and art, and I will let you have Christ' ... Christ did not understand women ... Literary recollections, Belinsky, Granovsky, Herzen ... Turgenev and others.' Stepan Trofimovich does not merely 'recollect' all these figures of his generation but also represents them because they become part of his own character as well. Dostoevsky's artistic practice, even if he started as here with an identifiable prototype, was never simply to delineate an individual; he allowed himself the greatest freedom to create by amalgamation a 'type' that would portray his conception. Hence Stepan Trofimovich fuses Granovsky with Alexander Herzen, who had taken on Chernyshevsky himself in his slashing article, The Superfluous and the Bilious, and who defended the importance and dignity of art - just as Stepan Trofimovich does in the unsurpassed fete scene of the novel - against what Herzen called 'the Daniels of the Neva'.

If Dostoevsky could immediately grasp the character of Stepan Trofimovich in all the pathetic splendor of his