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Title: Demons by Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky ISBN: 0-679-73451-1 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 01 August, 1995 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.62 (16 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A re-affirmation of life
Comment: Fyodor Dostoyevesky, perhaps the greatest novelist of all-time, has a canon of mostly very long books that delve deeply into the darker psychological corners of man's mind. He shed long-dormant light on such subjects as the conscience, madness, the existence of God, family and criminal psychology, and a great many other things besides. In Demons, he explored yet another dark corner of the human mind: the tendency of people, particularly young people, towards nihilism. We have seen in our own times -- in the 1960's, certainly, and, perhaps, we are beginning to see it again now -- the tendency of youth to rebel against everything that the previous generation and the current powers that be stood and stand for, to tear everything down, to start anew. And yet, for all the promise of the 60's ideaology, where has it gotten us? How much change has actually taken place? Are we really any better off than before? Why did the movement fizzle out, and so quickly? Nothing is sadder, for the young modern liberal, than the sight of an old hippie, once idealistic and hungry, now shriveled up, in a depressed state, living off of social security. In Demons, Dostoyevsky explains why this happens.
In it, he shows the inherent hollowness of the nihilistic viewpoint, that it always leads to the same place in the end. As Don Henley once sang, "It's another hollow rebellion/As rebellions often are/Just another raging tempest/In a jar." For all its idealism and visions of utopia, it always ends up the same way in the end. What is practitioners often don't seem to realize is that it denies life itself. How can any movement, however pious and idealistic, suceed, if it does this? Many people have observed how the ideas embedded in Dostoyevsky's novels foresaw the philosophy of Nietzsche -- and yet, for all of the darkness and social criticism that sprang from the two men, what many people often overlook is the fact that both of them, in essence, AFFIRM LIFE (for proof of this, one need only to look at the fate of the characters in the book who deny life: even those, like Shatov, who do it once and then repent are, in the end, doomed.) To both Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, it is not only wrong to live one's life merely for the sake of a higher power or for hope of a reward in some afterlife, but it is also wrong to live one's life for an "ism" -- whether it be atheism, idealism, anarchism, nihilism, or whatnot. Granted, both men themselves subscribed to such things; Dostoyevsky, himself a revolutionary who was served 10 years in jail, some at hard labor, and was nearly executed, saw Demons as "novel pamphlet", his own attempt to speak out at the wave of materialism that had, at the time, infested Russia, and to break out of his habit of dealing in negative modes of thinking. To paraphrase Dostoyevsky's famous letter, modern nihilists do not deny the existence of God: that is over and done with: no one cares about it, anymore. What they do, instead, is deny, with all their might, God's creation, God's world, and everything in it.
Pity the poor revolutionary who attempts to incite a rebellion while denying, at the same time, the very means he must use to do so. Neil Peart once wrote "Changes aren't permanent/But change is." Indeed, change is a good thing: anything which does not change will, inevitably, become stagnant. However, whatever changes we may hope to bring about, we must always remember to affirm life. Thank God we have the works of Dostoyevsky left to remind us.
This brilliant novel explores other subjects as well: the responsiblity of one generation for the next generation, the responsiblity of teachers for their students, and, above all, the responsiblity of philosophers for their ideas. A must-read novel essential for any reader of classics or Russian literature.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Prophet Armed
Comment: Dostoevsky, as the great historian of Russia Richard Pipes notes, hated Socialism and Socialists more than all else under the sun. This is a continuation of his bombardment of collectivists and utopianists that began with "Notes from Underground" and continued with "Crime and Punishment." Dostoevsky, a Christian and a Russian patriot (in the best -- Roger Scrutonian -- sense of the word) -- rejected anything and everything that would make men and women into mere social ciphers, cogs in the machine of history, into "means" rather than "ends" (to use the terminology of Kant).
Dostoevsky's primary inspiration for this novel came from an absolutely horrid novel by one Nikolai Cherneshevsky called "Chto Eto", or "What is to be Done?" An early bit of Russian utopianism, it was a precursor of the vicious theories Lenin/Stalin would deploy to "drag" Russia into the 20th century (indeed it was Lenin's favorite novel). The fact that some 66 million would be killed on the grand march to utopia was irrelevant (as the lunatic Shigalyov states in Dostoevsky's novel, "from unlimited freedom, I ended with unlimited despotism. . ." the solution] to the problems of mankind is to grant absolutely freedom to one-tenth and turn the remaining nine-tenths into a herd).
This echoes, of course, the magisterial "dialogue" between Christ and the Grand Inquisitor on the nature of human freedom in The Brothers Karamazov. But this novel is relevant for more than its attack on socialism and communism -- both of which, outside of Cuba, China, and a couple of bookstores in New York City and maybe California -- have collapsed precisely because they could do no more than create misery and murder. What makes The Demons -- indeed, the entire Dostoevsky corpus -- particularly relevant in this first decade of the 21st century is his take on the Russian intelligentsia/liberals of the 1840s -- a group characterized by out and out hatred for their country, which created the conditions for the rise of nihilism, terrorism, and bolshevism in the 1860s-1890s. Those 1840s intellectuals, like the "intelligentsia" of today's America, adopted a "blame Russia first" attitude toward all internal and external problems -- glorying in Russia's humiliations, and cursing her victories. It's not a far leap from Dostoevsky's Stepan Verkhovensky to the likes of Lapham, Vidal, and Moore. The real threat to one's community, Dostoevsky argues, is not the farmer or the factory worker who attends church, votes Republican, and drinks his beer in a tavern, whose sons and daughters march to war because they believe it their duty to the country that bore and sustained them, but those who, cloaking themselves in the false-prophet mantle of "dissent," spit and sneer at the foundations of community, or what Russians would call sobernost -- the things that makes Russia Russia, the things that make America America. Dostoevsky's work is both warning and antidote. It's no wonder he was banned by Lenin; one doubts he is discussed around the smart parties of Manhattan today.
Rating: 5
Summary: The PROPHET who is also the ''GREAT SATAN''
Comment: Has the Western Culture any hope to understand Russian soul that mentioned in Dostoyevsky's books?The soul,Russian soul,that means loving humans,loving all creatures or just loving to love.
All the things I mentioned above are ordinary pieces of subject of Dostoyevsky's books.DEMONS,Dostoyevsky's book that has ideas which has incredible deepness about the main problems concerning socialist trends of all-times,is offical enemy of ''nihilism''.Why?Because ''nihilism''is a socialist trend that adopt himself to acts aginst all kind of loves and social tendences ,so to the Russian soul.
How can Dostoyevsky successfuly defend humanity against cruel attack of ''nihilism''.Because he almost internal to ideas,acts,hierarchy of groups of ''nihilists''.Dostoyevsky is the prophet who shows the way to universal worths, but he also introduce his main human character,GREAT SATAN,who reflect the dark face of humanity in his books(especially in DEMONS).
I want to send my regards to Dostoyevsky's geniunity as one do in reviews of Immanuel Kant's book ''critic of pure reason''.
DOSTOYEVSKY IS THE MAN!!!
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Title: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Constance Garnett ISBN: 0553211757 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 June, 1984 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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Title: The Idiot (Oxford World's Classics) by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Alan Myers, Fyodor M. Dostoevsky ISBN: 0192834118 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: May, 1998 List Price(USD): $7.95 |
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Title: Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky ISBN: 067973452X Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 30 August, 1994 List Price(USD): $10.95 |
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Title: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky ISBN: 0374528373 Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux Pub. Date: 14 June, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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Title: The Idiot by Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky, Fyodor Dostoevsky ISBN: 0375702245 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 08 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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