Devils , livre ebook

Devils
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Translated by Roger Cockrell


ALMA CLASSICS


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Alma BOOKS Ltd 3 Castle Yard Richmond Surrey TW10 6TF United Kingdom www.almaclassics.com
Devils first published in Russian in 1871–72 This translation first published by Alma Books Ltd in 2017
Translation, Notes and Introduction © Roger Cockrell, 2017 Extra Material © Alma Classics Ltd
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isbn : 978-1-84749-641-6
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Contents
Introduction
Translator’s Note
List of Characters
Devils
part one
Chapter 1 : In Place of an Introduction:
Chapter 2 : Prince Harry. Matchmaking
Chapter 3 : Someone Else’s Sins
Chapter 4 : The Lame Girl
Chapter 5 : The Wise Serpent
part two
Chapter 1 : Night
Chapter 2 : Night (Continued)
Chapter 3 : The Duel
Chapter 4 : General Expectation
Chapter 5 : Before the Fête
Chapter 6 : Pyotr Stepanovich Gets Busy
Chapter 7 : “Our” Group Gets Together
Chapter 8 : Ivan the Tsarevich At Tikhon’s
Chapter 9 : Stepan Trofimovich Is Searched
Chapter 10 : Filibusters. A Fateful Morning
part three
Chapter 1 : The Fête. Part One
Chapter 2 : The Conclusion of the Fête
Chapter 3 : The End of a Romance
Chapter 4 : The Final Decision
Chapter 5 : A Visitor from Abroad
Chapter 6 : A Difficult Night’s Work
Chapter 7 : Stepan Trofimovich’s Final Peregrination
Chapter 8 : Conclusion
Note on the Text
Notes
Extra Material on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Devils
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Life
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Works
Select Bibliography


Introduction
On 21st November 1869, a shocking event took place in Moscow: the brutal murder of a young student from the Agricultural Academy, Ivan Ivanov. The perpetrators were a small group of people led by the radical intellectual Sergei Nechayev, who had earlier cooperated with the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin in the writing of a guide to revolutionary activity, The Catechism of a Revolutionist . Dostoevsky was living abroad at the time, but as an avid reader of the Russian newspapers, and as someone with a keen interest in the psychology of the criminal mind, he was to follow the story particularly closely. His notebooks and letters were soon to contain references to a new work that was to include a graphic description of a murder committed under very similar circumstances.
Two years earlier, in April 1867, Dostoevsky had left Russia, partly to escape his creditors and partly at the insistence of his new wife Anna. After a period in Switzerland, the couple had eventually settled in the German city of Dresden under difficult circumstances. In May 1868, while they were still living in Geneva and while he was completing his novel The Idiot (to be published in serial form that same year), they had been devastated by the death of their first daughter Sofya, aged less than three months. In addition, the stress arising from the constant requirement to fulfil his contractual obligations to journals was compounded by ever more frequent epileptic attacks and a growing obsession with gambling.
The year 1869 saw several unfulfilled plans, including The Life of a Great Sinner , a wide-ranging work on the topic of atheism. By the beginning of 1870, however, these plans had been superseded by his new novel, which came to be known as Devils . Almost immediately Dostoevsky began referring to this new work as a “pamphlet-novel”. “I have high hopes for the piece I’m writing for the Russian Herald , but not so much for its artistic qualities as for its tendentiousness… it may well come out as a pamphlet, but I’ll be saying what I want to say” (letter to Nikolai Strakhov of 24th March 1870). Nevertheless, within a few months Dostoevsky began to realize that a work based simply on an attack on Nechayev and his nihilist ideology would be too limiting; in a letter to Mikhail Katkov, the editor of the Russian Herald , he wrote that the character of Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky (the figure based on Nechayev) was “insufficiently captivating… not worthy of literature” (8th October 1870). The following day he wrote to Strakhov: “A new figure has emerged with claims to be the novel’s new hero , since the previous hero… has become secondary. I have been so taken by this new hero that I have set about yet another transformation of the novel…”
The introduction of this “new hero”, Nikolai Stavrogin (derived partly from The Life of a Great Sinner ), was indeed to add a radically different dimension to the novel. Many prototypes have been suggested for Stavrogin, including historical figures such as Nechayev’s collaborator, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, and various literary characters such as Shakespeare’s Prince Harry, Goethe’s Faust and Dickens’s Steerforth in David Copperfield . Most revealing of all, however, is to see Stavrogin as the heir to the “superfluous men” who had featured so prominently in Russian literature ever since Pushkin’s portrayal of Eugene Onegin forty years earlier. Of these, the most striking parallel is with Pechorin, the protagonist of Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time (1840) – an intelligent, talented figure, whose positive qualities are vitiated by his crippling self-awareness, his emotional coldness and his propensity to destroy other people’s lives.
Stavrogin, however, remains in a class of his own. At one time, we learn, he was a uniquely powerful and charismatic figure, capable of transforming the lives and beliefs of all those with whom he came into contact. These include, most significantly, Pyotr Verkhovensky himself, the Slavophile Shatov, with his impassioned view of Russia as the only “God-bearing nation”, and the deranged engineer Kirillov, with his messianic conviction that by killing himself he will thereby “kill” God and be the first man on earth to demonstrate man’s superiority. Within the time frame of the novel, however, Stavrogin drifts through life, his actions now largely drained of significance. With his portrayal of this “impostor” (and it is the semi-insane figure of Marya Lebyadkina who, more percipiently than anyone, sees through the pretence), Dostoevsky points to the link between paralysing indifference and the lack of belief in God. If Stavrogin acts at all, it is from a masochistic impulse to do something so absurd or so repellent that it merely confirms the pointlessness of his own existence. This is reflected in meaningless actions such as his duel with Gaganov, his marriage to Marya Lebyadkina and, most disturbingly, in his seduction of a young girl as detailed in his confession to Bishop Tikhon – in the chapter which Dostoevsky originally saw as crucial for a full understanding of Stavrogin, but which was banned by the censors, and which was never to be published in his lifetime. Stavrogin claims he is seeking a burden to give his life meaning ( stavros is the Greek for cross), but ironically it is the burden of his own emptiness that is too much for him to bear. Stavrogin’s portrait remained incomplete, but Dostoevsky was impatient, not least for pressing financial reasons, for Devils to see the light of day. It was published, in serial form, in Katkov’s Russian Herald during 1871 and the first months of 1872.
The leisurely, discursive opening of Devils is in marked contrast to the immediacy, say, of Crime and Punishment . We find ourselves in the hands of a narrator ambiguously poised between detached observer and participant, who purports to be a precise chronicler of events, but whose remarks and judgements are littered with caveats and qualifications. “This is what, or approximately what, Pyotr Stepanovich must have been thinking,” he seeks to reassure us at one point. His most demanding role is to act as confidant to Pyotr’s father, the hapless Stepan Trofimovich, as he strives to retain some measure of dignity in his brittle relationship with Nikolai Stavrogin’s mother, Varvara Petrovna (the novel’s binding thread). But, as the novel proceeds, his attempts to explain how he manages to convey the details of events from which he was absent become more and more implausible, until he disappears almost entirely into the wings.
Not before he has served his purpose, however. The narrator’s fallibility and limited vision are as much a reflection of the malaise that pervades his story as the shortcomings of any of the characters he introduces us to. Set in an anonymous provincial town, his chronicle unwinds to reveal an apocalyptic vision of a society standing on the edge of an abyss. The wider import of the two epigraphs soon becomes apparent: unable to see the way ahead, gullible human beings can all too easily be led astray by demons bent on their undoing, while the parable of the Gadarene swine shows how people’s fevered brains can be possessed by destructive ideas – as von Lembke, the crazed provincial governor, remarks at the height of the conflagration that engulfs part of the town: “The fire is in the minds of men, and n