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Title: Devils (Oxford World's Classics) by Fyodor Dostoevsky ISBN: 0-19-283829-6 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 December, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.17 (29 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Watch what you say - people tend to believe it.
Comment: This ia a great book with many plotlines, truly entertaining and intellectually stimulating. Despite a characteristic criminal underpinnings, the novel is dedicated to another question which was very important to Dostoyevsky: Are individuals responsible for the ideas they produce. The main character, Stavrogin, is awash with doctrines he recycled from the old toothless liberal tradition. His personal charisma is so great that people around burn up with his ideas and turn into blind fanatics of a particular intellectual fad. The novel's got them all: religious nationalism, self-deifying egotism, revolutionary nihilism, totalitarian elitism. The advent of all these ill-conceived personal philosophies was ignited by the man who has absolutely no faith. While the self-styled anarchists wreak the havoc on a small provincial town, the protagonist has to decide whether he is responsible for people's serious interpretations of the theories he made up as a means of avoiding intellectual ennui. The novel is centered around the final encounter of the passive, aloof, and faithless "intellectual father" and vigorously fanatic "children". Truly captivating and probably the most easily readable of Dostoyevsky's books.
Rating: 5
Summary: Modernity and Madness as synonyms
Comment: Dostoyevsky is, of course, the greatest novelist, and this great book is no let down. Though it was slow for me initially (I feared that I would be bogged down in Russian society) it soon picked up and became absolutely engrossing. Here is a continuation of Dotoyevsky's attack on the "disease" of modernism that he hints at in Raskolnokov's Siberian Dreams (from Crime and Punishment). This novel is valuble not only for it's humanity in the face of dehumanizing ideology, but also as an eye into the Russian conscience. It provides a fascinating look at how Russian intellectuals were primed for Communism. Heart Rending, fascinating, informative. The greatest!! (P.S. Given the respect given to Judiaism at one point in the novel, the 'Yid' comments are colloquial and part of a portrait. I don't believe they can be taken as genuine anti-semitic commments)!
Rating: 5
Summary: Politically prescient, historically significant
Comment: I've always felt that fiction is like a window to the past, and with "The Devils," Dostoevsky gives us a clear glimpse at the underground politics brewing in Czarist Russia. At the same time, his propensity to write about criminals and people with criminal hearts is nowhere more emphasized among his major novels than in this one. There is not one character I could identify as a traditional hero, not even the semi-anonymous narrator, who relates the novel's events with the impartiality of a security camera; they are all antiheros -- a room full of Raskolnikovs.
The novel concerns a small band of Russian intellectuals, atheists, socialists, anarchists, and various other rabble who are distributing subversive leaflets in an attempt to incite the proletariat to revolt against the government. They are a motley group, destined to fail because they lack general competence, organizational skills, a clear agenda, definite plans, and even uniform ideas. The only thing they have in common is that they don't like the way things currently are in Russia and intend to change them, violently if necessary.
Among this group we meet Nicholas Stavrogin, an obnoxious, insensitive young man who is only looking out for himself and is not above having affairs with his friends' wives. The group's prime mover and instigator is Peter Verkhovensky, whose father Stepan had been Nicholas's tutor and is still living platonically with Nicholas's widowed mother, one of the wealthier citizens of the town in which the novel takes place. The group's rank-and-file who figure most prominently into the plot include the suicidal Kirilov, a former member (and potential informer) named Shatov who just wants to put it all behind him, a useless drunkard named Lebyatkin who acts as the group's stooge, and an escaped convict named Fedka who becomes the group's henchman.
That many of these people are dead by the end of the novel is not as surprising as how they get that way. The plot is built around intrigues, disloyalties, and the type of drawing-room confessions and revelations that characterize the best mysteries. It's not difficult to guess that there is a juicy secret about Lebyatkin's crippled, mentally disturbed sister Mary, or that the elegant fete arranged by Julia Lembke, the Governor's wife, will culminate in a spectacular, outrageous, and perhaps deadly climax; Dostoevsky likes sensationalism and never misses a chance to use human frailty and folly as hosts upon which the morally hollow feed like parasites.
Dostoevsky's description of these men as "devils" is a biblical allusion to the book of Luke, translating Christ's power to drive the devils out of a possessed man into a herd of swine to the cleansing of Russia of its nefarious political elements. It would appear that "The Devils" is Dostoevsky's effort to demonize the soulless, devilish radicals who have no moral underpinnings and who would replace everything he considers good about Russia (namely, the Eastern Orthodox Church) with Western ideas. There is an obvious parallel to the Bolshevik Revolution of nearly half a century later, which shows that such Socialist sentiment had been bubbling under the Russian mainstream for many years prior to its twentieth century emergence. In that sense, this is a prescient novel of historical and political interest.
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Title: The Idiot (Oxford World's Classics) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alan Myers ISBN: 0192834118 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 1998 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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Title: Crime and Punishment (Crime & Punishment) by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Constance Garnett ISBN: 0553211757 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 July, 1984 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: Notes from Underground (Vintage Classics) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Richard Pevear ISBN: 067973452X Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 September, 1994 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: The Double (Dover Thrift Editions) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky ISBN: 0486295729 Publisher: Dover Publications Pub. Date: 01 March, 1997 List Price(USD): $2.00 |
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Title: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Konstanfin Mochulski ISBN: 0553212168 Publisher: Bantam Classics Pub. Date: 01 March, 1995 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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