Ten minutes ago, I finished reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Demons. Thus, my impressions are raw, but I want to record them before I learn what the professional literati class has decreed about this book, so this review can be unadulterated or influenced by any outside sources.
On Christmas Eve my son Coleman told me he was reading Demons, and that I should too, and afterwards we could discuss it together. In my journey through fatherhood, there is absolutely nothing I enjoy more than when my children solicit my thoughts on what might be called the universal struggles of mankind. I know that sounds a bit hackneyed and trite, but great literature is great precisely because it examines these issues. It enriches and connects us. There’s a universality, a common bond, and we are connected to people throughout the ages, including people who lived in Russia 150 years ago. I have always loved it when my children have engaged me in their intellectual curiosities. When Coleman and I discuss various ideas, I’ve been wowed at his insightfulness. Why that boy knows a lot of stuff! I find I am talking less and listening to him more. Nothing is cooler. God, I love it. I wouldn’t trade a billion dollars for these experiences, much less for the pride I feel in that boy of mine.
As you may expect, the story takes place in a “provincial town” in Russia. A band of malcontent revolutionaries have formed. They are nihilists. They hate the existing order and are active in undermining conventional society. As in Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky’s genius is in explaining the psychological intricacies of not just the human mind, but the Russian mind as well. I’ve never been to Russia. I have a Teutonic mind. I am told if one flies over Germany, all the fields and houses are neat, organized and the landscape is almost geometric in its precision. Then one flies over European Russia and its completely different, haphazard, disorganized and untidy. These people are different and that’s what makes Russian literature so fascinating. When I read The Brothers Karamazov twenty plus years ago, one scene encapsulated my thoughts on Russians. The three brothers were in a provincial inn pouring out their souls in these long metaphysical, esoteric and philosophical soliloquies. These sons of bitches are crazy! We Teutonic people talk about practicalities, concrete things. Russians talk about what’s weighing on their hearts and the meaning of life. Since many Russian authors hit these same themes, over and over, I can only conclude that Russians are really like this!
In Demons, Dostoevsky leaves the reader hanging about the true nature of his characters and how they interrelate to one another; bits and dribbles, a nugget here and a nugget there. I was afraid I was going to need to read the book for a second time to really “get it,” but by the end, he weaves it all together rather nicely. I think I “got it,” at least its central theme, but maybe not all of its subtleties. Perhaps that’s what makes a great book a great book.
What was it like? How I would’ve liked to have seen Czarist Russia in the latter half of the 19th century! The great estates, the balls, the nobility, the manners, the polite conventions, the religious mysticism, the provincial folklore, the peasants working the fields and of course the enigmatic personalities. What is so striking is the material wealth. Even provincial towns that were miles and miles down a muddy road from nowhere had luxury goods. All sorts owned their houses. There’s champagne, oysters, salmon, beef, veal and other staples. Even the peasants had access to a surprising array of goods and services. There’s no electricity, no cars, no running water, but virtually every house has a samovar with black tea from China. From China! In the middle of nowhere!
Nihilism, the birth mother of Soviet Communism destroyed it all, and Russia still has not recovered.
Dostoevsky’s revolutionaries parallel today’s woke activists and their doltish followers. The similarities are uncanny. Their stated belief structure is the same as today: “if we undermine and destroy the foundations of civil society, one day, there will be a great uprising and magically there will be some sort of utopian paradise taking its place.” While this is their stated creed, clearly destruction is their primary, perhaps sole goal. I really don’t think many of this ilk care what follows once all is burnt to ashes. Dostoevsky is a docent giving us a tour into the psychological crevices, deficient wiring and inconsistencies of woke brains. Like today, there’s virtually no thought as to what this paradise will look like, how it will be structured or how it could possibly be better than the present. Those of us familiar with history and human nature know that if the nihilists get their way, there will be no future paradise. There will misery, slavery, poverty, mass murder and genocide. Indeed, it will be hell.
Speaking of hell, the real theme of the book is life without God is hell. If you are unfamiliar with the tenets of Christianity, let’s say you are an Ivy League professor, you will undoubtedly miss what this book is really about. It couldn’t be clearer to me. Limousine liberals and secular humanists will sneer at you if you think Satan is real, and thus THEY BECOME the ones most susceptible to his wily ways, and the most dangerous towards society’s continued progression. Lucifer is the great deceiver, a psychological genius, an accomplished and skilled manipulator, and a clever and gifted liar. We all want to be our own gods and disobey the laws that God has so clearly manifested to us. The hubris of Dostoevsky’s and today’s leftist, pseudo intellectual class blinds them to God’s realities. They can’t see what is clear. They become their own self-serving deities, but they are not serving themselves, they are serving the Evil One who they have allowed to slip past the sentries into their soul and dwell within them. One must know that the devil creeps among us and to be on guard. In Ephesians, Paul says “put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.” Yet, the characters in Demons as well as the woke “characters” rioting and pulling down statues in American cities don’t know they’ve been infected by the Prince of Darkness as they’ve have never known to wear Paul’s armor.
A spiritual world is being fought all around us. It seems more acute and noticeable than ever, but the war has been ongoing since Eve ate the apple. We live in a fallen world. It is not naturally going to get better unless we get reconciled with God. This is EXACTLY what Demons is about. The nihilists have succumbed to the lie. The Holy Spirit knocks, but they have bolted the door shut. They let the devil control their consciousness, they hate the world and thus they want to destroy it. It is not worth saving, and many of them believe their lives are not worth living. Who do you think puts these thoughts in their heads? God offers a different way. He offers joy, redemption, reconciliation and most of all purpose. It just doesn’t happen, one must let the light in and be vigilant against the darkness. It’s purely voluntary, we are free to choose the healing powers of the light or the trickery and lies of darkness. Dostoevsky knows that this is the essential question of our existence, needing a decisive answer. He foretells the consequences for the individual and civil society when those of free will do not seek and receive the light.
Dostoevsky was presciently prophetic. He was casting out a warning, and events 45 years after Demons was published prove he was right.
He is still warning us today.
