Demons (Penguin Classics)

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He arrives as a large group of workers from the Spigulin factory are staging a protest about work and pay conditions. Despite the disaster of the reading, the ball goes ahead that evening, with Julia Mikhaylovna and Andrey Antonovich in attendance. Dostoevsky biographer Ronald Hingley described the novel as "an awesome, prophetic warning which humanity, no less possessed of collective and individual devilry in the 1970s than in the 1870s, shows alarmingly few signs of heeding. He is quickly followed by the literary genius Karmazinov who is reading a farewell to his public entitled " Merci".

This Hamlet-like indecision also affects another character who considers defecting – Liputin – who loathes the sect leader, Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, and his domineering attitude, but is so frightened by what he perceives as Verkhovensky’s power (a fear buttressed by the convenient and mysterious murder of Fedka the convict, who is in Verkhovensky’s employ) that he goes along with the plot to kill Shatov. Darya Pavlovna (Dasha) is Shatov's sister, the protégé of Varvara Petrovna, and for a short time the fiancée of Stepan Trofimovich.Dostoevsky was an active participant in a secret revolutionary society formed from among the members of the Petrashevsky Circle. Dostoevsky's nihilists are portrayed in their ordinary human weakness, drawn into the world of destructive ideas through vanity, naïveté, idealism, and the susceptibility of youth. According to Praskovya, Varvara Petrovna's young protégée Darya Pavlovna (Dasha), has also somehow become involved with Nikolai Vsevolodovich, but the details are ambiguous.

Stavrogin calmly replies that Marya (née Lebyadkina) is indeed his wife, and that he will make sure the Captain causes her no further trouble. In the following years he published his most enduring and successful books, including Crime and Punishment (1865).

By flattery, surrounding her with a retinue and encouraging her exaggerated liberal ambition, he acquires a power over her and over the tone of her salon.

In the past Stavrogin had inspired Shatov with exhortations of the Russian Christ, but this marriage and other actions have provoked a complete disillusionment, which Shatov now angrily expresses. She accuses him of being an imposter who has come to kill her with his knife, and demands to know what he has done with her "Prince". But attention is immediately diverted to a new drama: Stavrogin has entered the room, and he is accosted by Liza. Though very conscious of his own erudition, higher ideals and superior aesthetic sensibilities, Stepan Trofimovich doesn't actually seem to do anything at all in the scholarly sense. He plunges headlong into a passionate exhortation of his own aesthetic ideals, becoming increasingly shrill as he reacts to the derision emanating from the audience.In the end, one still has some affection for those we left behind – affection that can lead us back into the grasp of the group. Of the same generation as Stepan Trofimovich, Karmazinov is a vain and pretentious literary has-been who shamelessly seeks to ingratiate himself with Pyotr Stepanovich and does much to promote the nihilists' legitimacy among the liberal establishment. As teachers and strong personalities, Stavrogin and Stepan Trofimovich influence those around them, and thus the demons enter the swine. He claims that this matter can be resolved by asking a simple question of each individual: in the knowledge of a planned political murder, would you inform the police? We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from.