Demons

5/5

I've read and reread this book countless times, anytime I start this and take over 2 days of a break from it I feel compelled to start from the top again.

Very few books do you come across where the writer takes events from life (or whatever fictional setting they've conjured up) and put them onto paper without doing nothing more than narrating these events in their own style and calling it a day. The most brilliant thing about this book is how naturally Dostoevsky swaps from different communication styles from character to character. Arguably this is something he does throughout all his works but it is much more pronounced in demons and especiallythis translation (Pevear & Volokhonsky's).

The book has always been on of my favourites—if
not, my favourite—out of Dostoevsky's corpus. It's not that this story is the most enticing or most unique of his works, it's just that it feels the most organic of them all.

Having just finished reading this book, I'm starting it again from the beginning.

The trouble with long 19th-century Russian novels is that they have lots of characters with quite complicated relationships. Some editions have a list of the more prominent characters at the beginning so that one can refer to it, but this edition doesn't, so when the book picks up the story of a character 100 or more pages on, one has to go paging back to find what was the last thing that happened to them.

My impressions on a first reading are that there is a slow buildup, very different from the current style of starting the story in medias res and telling the backstory later.

In a provincial Russian town there is a lot of gossip. The narrator drops hints to the reader of serious events to come, but the lives of the characters seem deceptively dull and trivial. The biggest event on the horizon is a fundraising fete organised by the governor's wife for the governesses of the province. There are a few subversive manifestos circulating, but nothing very serious. It seems to be a very placid teacup in which no storms are likely. I don't think it is a spoiler to say that the number of prominent characters who end up as corpses turns out to be something of a surprise.

I may write a fuller review when I've read it again to remind myself of what some of those who ended up as corpses were doing earlier in the story.