Demons

Начало книги

Dostoevsky's Demons, probably the greatest novel ever inspired by a revolutionary conspiracy, was not the book that its author had intended to write. The story of how it came into being in its present form is rather a complicated one, involving Dostoevsky's own literary ambitions, the fact that he was living abroad, and the appearance in the Russian and German newspapers, which he read assiduously every day, of stories about an atrocious crime committed in his homeland by a small cell of revolutionaries.

At the time this news appeared, Dostoevsky had been dreaming of writing another type of novel entirely, one that would center on the loss of religious faith and its recovery; but he felt that he could not create such a work before returning to Russia from his European exile. The cause of his prolonged, four-year sojourn in Europe was not, as in the case of Turgenev, a preference for the amenities of European culture, but simply a need to escape from creditors who, on his return, might have thrown him into debtors' prison. The debts involved, incidentally, had not accumulated because of his own imprudence, as is too often assumed, but were those of a failed commercial venture of his deceased older brother, whose obligations he had voluntarily assumed. Dostoevsky's first idea for what became Demons was thus to knock off rapidly what he called a political 'pamphlet', in which he could express all his by now bitter hatred of the radicals and their ideology. It might also, at the same time, bring in sufficient income to enable him to return to Russia, where he would settle down to write the great work that he regarded as the culmination of his literary career. But things did not work out that way.

Читать дальше →