The Devils - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

My third Dostoyevsky was picked up at random. I even forget where it was that I picked this one. It had been lying for quite some time on my shelf but being humongous, as is characteristic of Russian novels, I decided to let it be until I felt I was ready for another voluminous piece of writing.

This Dostoyevsky was for some reason less interesting than my last few. Perhaps because of the issue that it explored. Or maybe it is because at times Dostoyevsky fails to live up to the drama and thrill that he creates. Or maybe it was the irrelevant connections made between events in this story. The book delves into the rising socialistic views of the time and shows how the concept was misused by nihilists. There was all the usual drama : scandals, murder, angry mobs, eccentric individuals and even a shocking and disturbing confession. The style of writing has been commented upon enough by me in the previous posts.

The story starts as the narration of the life of a particular Stephan Verhovensky, a retired professor. The story describes his last days of life and the sequences of events that created a big riot in his town. The reason of this entire pandemonium is the arrival of a few young people into the town. Pyotor Verhovensky, son of Stephan, and Nikolay Stravrogin, son of Varvara Petrovna who is an old friend and love of Stephan and has also taken care of him for the past years. Pyotor is running an underground quintet of socialists and nihilists who are distributing manifestos and creating upsets in town. Then follow a series of abstruse events : Pyotor's ego-centric usage of the quintet, Shatov's (a former member of the socialist group) betrayal and murder, Nikolay's confessions, a town ball full of scandals. In the end we return to the travelling Stephan and watch him die like the eccentric he was.

What I perhaps found lacking in this book was a connection that I had previously established with Dostoyevsky's narrators. Here he is a simple narrator with little to do with the story. A bystander who observes and logs. And also I somehow found the series of scandals less scandalising than the behaviours of his central characters, which in my opinion should have been stressed upon a bit more. Either way, the philosophy behind the book was well conveyed and though a bit too drag on the whole, the book was interesting in bursts.