Dostoevsky - Demons - A Philosophical Guide

Hello, everyone! I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

So today we’re talking about the book Demons, another one of the five great novels of Dostoevsky.

And as usual, apologize for the slight redundancy at the beginning of these posts, but this will be covering the philosophical themes of the book. This isn’t intended to be a replacement for reading the book.

I just feel the need to clear that up every time I write a post like this.

Another important thing to mention is that this is now the third book from Dostoevsky that we’ve covered. So, Notes from the Underground and Crime and Punishment will be referenced throughout this entire post. Just a heads-up.

With that said, how do you begin to describe a book like Demons, one of the most complex books that Dostoevsky ever wrote in his lifetime? I mean, there’s a lot to this book; it’s about 750 pages long and full of symbolism.

And, for what it’s worth, it’s also the book Nietzsche stumbled upon in a bookstore that made him a fan of Dostoevsky as a thinker.

It might be best to start this way: if you read my last post on Crime and Punishment, you’ll know that while it may look like one kind of book on the surface, it’s actually something deeper than that for Dostoevsky.

Crime and Punishment kind of masquerades as a book about a guy that murders a couple of people, but the true drama of the book is in his internal experience and his slow, painful coming to terms with his relationship to something greater than himself. And further, it’s about him finding a way to consent to that fact.

Well, if that’s what Crime and Punishment is, then Demons is a book that masquerades as a political novel. It’s a book that seems to be about a group of revolutionaries, a bunch of people upset about the state of Russian society. It shows them planning and executing acts of political violence to ultimately bring about revolution.

That may be what the book looks like.

But actually, to Dostoevsky, it’s more about (and he made a big point about this in a personal letter he wrote later to a friend) exploring the thing he maybe wrestled with most in his entire lifetime: the belief, or non-belief, in the existence of God.

The way this connects to