#this was worse than when i read TBK lol

[plutorine]

So... I just finished Demons...

heavy spoilers below the cut!

Honestly, I have no idea as to how I’m supposed to structure this review, given that I have many thoughts (and feelings) about having just ended another novel that’s full to the brim with things to talk about. I’m just going to write this according to the flow of my thoughts.

I’ve been told months before starting Demons that the first part is a little boring to get through, but in retrospect, I don’t subscribe to that belief anymore. Setting up the backdrop with Stepan and Varvara’s relationship was essential in establishing the main themes of the story.

(a) Control. For a woman in that century, seizing the opportunity to have the upperhand over a man is the most viable and beneficial option for Varvara. Sure, she might be more financially well-off than Stepan, but in the eyes of the conservative society then, she’s still supposed to defer to him due to her sex. There’s a passage wherein (I think) Stepan contemplated marrying Varvara (after Vsevolod Stavrogin’s death), but he ultimately decided not to. Even if he did push through with it, I don’t think Varvara would have agreed, either, because that meant succumbing to someone who she obviously thought was below her (“...no doubt, Varvara very often did hate him…”), and of course, knowing her character, she would absolutely not do that. 

(b) Projection/idealization. Varvara quite literally had Stepan dress up like the Kukolnik portrait that she saw as a young girl. She saw Stepan as her “creation”, even; she defended him from everything and so whenever he acted in a way that betrayed her image of him, she’d grow resentful of him. Varvara, having invested a lot into Stepan — emotionally and financially — now expects him to slavishly obey and go along with her every whim. Here, one can also see the transactional element of the relationships in Demons, and we see this, along with the other aforementioned themes, become more fleshed out as the story progresses. 

We’re introduced to Nikolai Stavrogin next, who is Varvara’s only son. I’ve spoken a great deal about Nikolai here already (especially on Twitter… My mutuals are probably so sick of seeing Maxim Matveev’s Stavrogin’s face on my account XD), but this is yet another opportunity for me to talk about him again. Having the privilege to be able to see him from a larger perspective and know about his childhood, I honestly felt sorry for him, even until his death. I tweeted this about him three months ago:

I’m not going to go on a rant about nature vs nurture here, but I really do believe that those nights where Stepan would just trauma dump unto this kid unprovoked without providing any good opinion of the world afterwards was what began Nikolai’s self-contained view of the world. I doubt he was able to make a lot of friends his age, too; he was quite the shy kid and he often kept to himself, not to mention that Varvara wasn’t the best parent, either. She provided for Nikolai, yes, but she fell short in actually being his mother. Nikolai was more of a status symbol for her than a son she cherished, really, and when she felt that something really disturbing had taken root within him, it was too late to do anything to counteract it. I gush about him a lot (like a lot, and this is more true if you follow me on Twitter), but it’s Matveev who I like, honestly. Not Nikolai as a person. I feel sorry for that loser (lovingly... and pitifully), because he’s carrying a weight inside of him that he can’t even grasp, and everyone around him is busy projecting whatever onto him. He voices out his frustration over this after the duel with Artemy Pavlovich, and it’s one of those moments that show how Nikolai isn’t just some figure of mystery and intrigue. He’s still a person, and he’s so, so tired of it all.

I also had a phase where I really got into picking apart Pyotr Verkhovensky’s character. As a psych grad, it’s so fascinating to see the theories I’ve learned that touch on the effects of parental neglect come alive through Pyotr. This, coupled with that childhood fear of his, molded him into the master manipulator that he was. Everything he does is for the sake of harnessing control, even if it makes him look stupid in the eyes of others. Pyotr’s “deference” to Nikolai is not an actual display of submission — it’s only a front, because what he really aims to do is to gain control of the latter through such an act. He’s boot-licking since he needs the influence that Nikolai has, not because he truly respects or sees him as someone so great; at the end of the day, it’s all about control. It’s why Pyotr does a complete 180-degree turn and goes from calling Nikolai the “sun” to “scoundrel” when he heard about him leaving town. And I bet that that struck a really sensitive nerve in Pyotr, having been abandoned by his own father as a child. I’ve also noticed something about him — he has his way with using his words on others so they’d go along with what he wants to do, but whenever someone attacks him with facts (e.g. Yulia Mikhailovna calling him out on his behavior towards Andrei Antonovich; Fedka telling him that he’s but a yapping dog and that Nikolai sees it as “...a great honor just to spit on him from above”), he cannot, for the life of him, handle it at all. Like, he gets MAD mad when someone lays the truth on him.

I want to take a moment and talk about the women in the story, too. I tweeted about the theme of the women being the men’s scapegoats for their wrongdoings. We see this with Yulia Mikhailovna, whose “idiotic behavior” was used to cover up Pyotr’s machinations behind the chaos that ruined the fête; I don’t intend to rid her of her influence in what happened, because she did have a hand in it, too; but it’s reductive and irresponsible to say that it was simply her who caused everything to go to shit. After all, Pyotr was the one who was living off of the influence she had, and he was using her as a pawn in his game, as well. Another example is Liza’s death. She’s killed by the townspeople because she was Nikolai’s mistress, and they believed her to be the reason why the Lebyadkins were killed, thus leading to the devastating fire that razed Zarechye. I can get behind that, but where’s the violence that is to be directed towards Nikolai himself? It takes two to tango, so why is he not getting the same kind of heat? There’s also Pyotr, who had orchestrated everything to lead her to Skvoreshniki. Again, I’m not saying Liza’s without agency (because she did choose to go there herself), but it was still a man who guided her down that path to destruction. 

One thing that sat at the back of my head and really weighed me down during my read was the scarcity of love in the story. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s entirely loveless, because there were moments where love was present (e.g. Mavriky’s acceptance of Liza even after everything that has happened, Kirillov’s support while Marie was on the brink of childbirth; and Shatov seeing a new beginning for his family after the birth of the baby), but the chaos and despair just greatly outweighed it. I didn’t expect it to feel light, anyway (like of course it wouldn’t be that way, this is a Dostoevsky novel, duh), but the experience was just really bleak. 

There are little genuine relationships in this novel, too. Everyone is constantly trying to one-up everyone else, and this post will not end if I decide to cite them all and analyze them. They're all constantly grappling for power over another person, and the lengths that they'd go to are even self-sabotaging. Like, "never mind if I look like a fool, hurt myself or others in the process; what matters is that I come on top of everyone." And of course, as I've discussed in an older post, you can't expect love to come out of a relationship that's borne out of the struggle for control and dominance.

I knew that everything was going to go to shit at the end of the novel, but the awareness of such did not dull the pain at all. Watching it actually go down as I was reading so horribly was still hard for me. I think what really killed me about Nikolai’s fate was Kirillov’s words about him: “...if Stavrogin believes, he doesn’t believe that he believes; but if he doesn’t believe, then he doesn’t believe that he doesn’t believe.” Nikolai’s not entirely convinced of his own faithlessness, much less comfortable with his nihilism. Up until the end he was looking for something to believe in, but as fate would have it, he’s unable to find what he was looking for. Like Tikhon said, Nikolai doesn’t want to be just lukewarm. He’d settle to either be warm or cold, even, but he can’t, because he doesn’t know how to escape the prison of the existential emptiness that he’s got inside of him. 

This leads me back to Kirillov, too. When Pyotr came to him to make sure that he would follow through with their agreement, I could feel Kirillov hesitating to kill himself. I don’t think I breathed when I was reading that part. I felt like he, too, was looking for a way out of this bargain with Pyotr, but alas, he couldn’t find it. 

And Shatov. God. His death happened so fast (as in the way it was narrated). It absolutely broke me how a few moments ago he was so happy, so excited to have Marie back and become a father to their baby (well, I know it isn’t his, but that’s Shatov’s baby. Period.) And then… It was all gone. Just like that. I had to take a moment after that chapter to debrief myself because it was just so sudden. I have no other words for this bit, honestly.

I want to say more, but I fear I’d be rambling too much already. I might put out separate posts according to a specific theme or element that I wanna discuss, but so far, this is all I have to say about Demons. Jesus Christ. 10/10, would probably read again, but not in the near future because it was just too much. Right now I’m just excited to integrate everything I’ve learned into my fanfiction since I’ve got a more confident grasp on the enigma that is Nikolai Stavrogin. God, I wanna make him suffer all over again. See you all in my next post about this damn novel.