Dostoevsky combines all these pages of irresistible satirical comedy with what seems to be their very opposite, the tragic theme of an unsuccessful quest for religious faith and personal salvation by 'a great sinner'. He has often been criticized for attempting to unite what seems, at first sight, to be such disparate material; but this criticism misunderstands the nature of his genius, and measures him by standards that are quite irrelevant to his poetics. Dostoevsky was one of the few novelists of the nineteenth century (rivalled in this respect perhaps only by Balzac) who could still feel the universe and human life as directly related to the ultimate questions about human life that are posed and answered only by religion. This is one reason why, in reading him, one is so constantly reminded of works produced in the great eras of poetic tragedy, when the relationship of man to the gods or to God was so much more instinctive and spontaneous. In general, characters in the novel do not usually relate their own mundane problems and dilemmas so immediately to the

'accursed questions' that always remained in the foreground of Dostoevsky's purview. It is no accident that, in The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan speaks nostalgically of the time when 'it was customary to bring down heavenly powers on earth' in literature, and mentions Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris as a modern novel in which a mystery play of this kind is depicted — one in which the Virgin Mary descends to earth. Dostoevsky, it might be said, tried to do the same with the world of the Virgin Mary (or to use a more Russian appellation, the Mother of God) in his own mode of 'fantastic realism', which remained within the realistic conventions of the nineteenth

century novel but enormously extended their usual range. He made realism 'fantastic' by using the extreme situations of melodrama or the criminal adventure novel, which he then elevated to the level of high tragedy by handling their sordid conflicts in terms of the transcendent values of religious faith. For him, the Machiavellianism of Pyotr Verkhovensky, purely social-political in nature, issued the same challenge to the moral basis of human life and society as did the personal experiment of Stavrogin to abolish his feeling for the distinction between good and evil. Both, in Dostoevsky's imagination, derived from the Western rationalism that he saw as inevitably leading to the replacement of the God-man Christ, with his morality of love, by the Man-god of egoism and power embodied in Stavrogin, Pyotr, and most nobly of all in Kirillov. It was because Dostoevsky possessed so acute a sense of this relation between the religious and the social that he was able to create the unparalleled and artistically viable synthesis between his 'pamphlet' and what he later called his 'poem', which was unfortunately weakened - though by no means destroyed - by the suppression of chapter 9.

One of the questions that inevitably arises about Demons is whether it should not be judged as an unpardonable slander on the Russian radicals who were valiantly struggling, against impossible odds, to create a brave new world. That the book is certainly hostile to the radicalism of its time goes without saying, but to call it 'slander' is very excessive; this would imply that Dostoevsky deliberately distorted and blackened the historical record so as to depict the radicals in the worst possible light. It is true that Dostoevsky gives the Nechaev affair much more importance than it actually warranted in the context of the time; no such widespread disturbances occurred as are depicted in the novel. But so far as the aims and tactics of Nechaev are concerned, as well as his actions and those of his followers, everything in the novel can be supported by what he and they actually did, or, as their propaganda made clear, would have liked to do if given the chance. Nor, in considering this question, should one overlook - though it is usually hardly noticed - the scathing image equally given of the stupidity of the reaction of the authorities in the person of the pitiful Governor-General von Lembke, whose half-crazed attempt at severity only succeeds in throwing oil on the fire of discontent.

It is also worth noting that, while the publication of Demons ruined Dostoevsky's standing with Russian progressives and the radical youth (though his repudiation by the young was only temporary), the new groups that began to reorganize in the early 1870s very self-consciously set themseves off from Nechaev and the moral miasma of his methods - which would indicate that Dostoevsky's portrayal of them was hardly as defamatory as has been charged, and possibly may even have had some effect. Moreover, it was not only the anti-radical Dostoevsky who was revolted by Nechaev and his tactics, with all their murderous consequences. Alexander Herzen, too, denounced the propaganda of Nechaev as leading to the provocation and unleashing of 'the worst passions'; and Marx and Engels used the Nechaev affair to have Bakunin and his followers booted out of the First International. 'These all-destroying anarchists,' they declared sententiously, 'who wish to reduce everything to amorphousness and to replace morality by anarchy, carry bourgeois (?) morality to its final extreme.'

Dostoevsky liked to recite Pushkin's poem, 'The Prophet', at benefit readings, and he was often hailed as 'a prophet' in his own lifetime. Such an accolade was usually stimulated by the references that he made, much like Shatov in the novel, to the future glories of the all-reconciling Christian world civilization that it was the God-given destiny of Russia to bring into being. If anything in his work is truly prophetic, however, it is his depiction of the radicals and the spread of their ideas in Demons. One cannot praise too highly the devastating portrayal of how the 'fashionable' progressive ideas brought from the capital permeate the stagnating provincial society, and how the 'radical chic'

of the wife of Governor-General von Lembke, which arouses the envy of Mme Stavrogin herself, only paves the way for such infiltration. The 'birthday party' at the Virginskys', which turns into a meeting of the local progressives, begins as a comic adolescent quarrel between a schoolboy and his female counterpart travelling round the country to raise the consciousness of students; but there is nothing comic about the troubled discovery announced by the radical 'theoretican' Shigalyov, who

Demons

has been tackling the problem of defining the conditions for achieving the earthly paradise.

'Starting from unlimited freedom,' he has noted to his dismay, 'I conclude with unlimited despotism.' (This has certainly become the most quoted passage in the book.) It is little wonder that a fairly recent (1990) Russian study of the novel should be entitled: Roman—Preduprezhdenie -'A Novel of Warning'. And the historian and critic Yury Karyakin, writing of the period just after Khrushchev had lifted the curtain on Stalin's crimes against humanity, cites the remark made to him with 'a sorrowful smile' by a friend, 'a typical Stepan Trofimovich', with a doctorate in chemistry and who played the flute: 'But you know, all this is in Demons. I was almost arrested in

'36 because I read the novel. Someone denounced me.. '

What is most remarkable, however, is that Dostoevsky still manages to make the dupes of Pyotr so pathetically and appealingly human amidst all their follies and delusions; they are very far from being scoundrels or villains whose motives are base or ignoble. One should always remember that Dostoevsky had himself been involved in a genuine revolutionary conspiracy in 1849 (it was a secret he kept concealed all his life), whose aim had been the abolition of serfdom; and he never accepted the official view that those who plotted against the state should simply be viewed as criminals.