When I finished this book a few weeks ago I wanted to turn back to the front and begin reading it again right away. I'm not going to, because there are too many other things I want to read. But I do want to return to it in time. This is not because I enjoyed it so much that I didn't want it to end (an experience I've had only a few times), but because I felt like I had missed something that might become clear on a second reading, and that a second reading might be more rewarding, even more enjoyable, than the first.
I made the same mistake with Devils that I did with The Brothers Karamazov: I read a couple of hundred pages fairly quickly, and then, because I'm never reading only one thing, I lost focus and went several weeks reading very little in it at all. By the time I got back to it in a serious way, I had begun to forget some of what was going on, and to have trouble keeping the characters straight (the chronic complaint of American and European readers, a result of both the relative complexity and general unfamiliarity of Russian names).
It was probably another hundred pages or so before I began to really get back a sense of coherent narrative flow. Even then, I had some trouble following what was happening: not the bare events, but their significance. Some of that is inevitable, for me at least, in a long and complex novel, since it's not possible for me to read for hours at a time. But I think it's worse with Dostoevsky than with some others. He is not obscure in the way that a 20th century poet is likely to be obscure, or in the way James Joyce is obscure–at the level of language, description, and action. One understands well enough what is happening on the stage from moment to moment–these two people have a conversation, that one starts on a journey, etc. But the motives and purposes are often obscure, to me at least. I frequently have the sense that I'm looking through some kind of fog, and in poor light. The psychology often escapes me. Opening and leafing through a few pages, I find this exchange.
"They're cunning; they had it all set up on Sunday…." he suddenly blurted out.
"Oh, no doubt," I cried, pricking up my ears, "it was all patched together, with the seams showing, and so badly acted."
"I don't mean that. You know, they left the seams showing on purpose, so that it would be noticed by…the right people. Do you understand?"
"No, I don't"
Well, neither did I. You might suppose that if you knew what had happened on Sunday, you would know what they meant. But you wouldn't necessarily. The events were straightforward enough, but the element of contrivedness, and the assertion that the contrivedness was itself contrived, and the identity of "the right people," are certainly not notions that had occurred to me on reading the account. Nor are they clarified in the rest of the exchange.
Much of the book consists of conversation, and much of that is filled with suggestions of innuendo and insult, remarked upon but not always explained, that are often obscure to me. In general I often felt, as with Karamazov, that many of the characters were, in the words of a friend, "just barely sane," though perhaps somewhat less so that in that work.
The edition I read was the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation, which is clear enough in its own right. It has an introduction by Joseph Frank, author of a five-volume biographical study of Dostoevsky and one of the great authorities on his work. The introduction closes with this:
For Demons is not only a novel that deals with some of the profoundest issues of the modern world, and indeed of human life–it is also a riveting page-turner, a great read, a thriller par excellence that is impossible to put down.
I don't know how many readers of the novel would agree with that. I certainly would not. And yet, as I said, I would like to read it again, because I recognize that it's a rich and profound book, and that my grasp of it is inadequate to say the least. I feel as I have often felt on hearing for the first time a symphony acknowledged to be great–Brahms's Third, for instance–but which did not immediately appeal to me: I didn't entirely get it, but I got enough to make me want to return to it. A second reading would be easier and no doubt bring more clarity, and an easier flow to the narrative–provided, of course, that I could stick with it and make the reading more of a piece.
To say a little about the story itself: this is Dostoevsky's most political novel, and although it was written almost a hundred and fifty years ago, it remains timely, because it deals in part with the nature of political ideology and its temptations, with the radical impulse to destroy everything and start anew, and the incompetence of the establishment in meeting the challenge. The fact that we have since then seen just such a demolition and starting-over only makes Dostoevsky's view of it seem more astute.
But as always with Dostoevsky, it is the spiritual crisis of the age that is the essential matter. And in that respect the book was badly compromised by the refusal of its publisher to publish a critical chapter. The character Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin (I think I got that right) is a sort of would-be nihilist who cannot entirely get rid of his conscience. In the originally unpublished chapter, he goes to visit a monk and confesses a terrible crime. This chapter, "At Tikhon's", was considered too shocking to print, and although it was not lost, Dostoevsky did not restore it to any edition published in his lifetime. Apparently it has become the common practice in modern editions to include it as an appendix. If you haven't read the book, I recommend that you read this chapter in what was to have been its position, as Chapter 9 of Part Two. I did not, and Stavrogin made very little sense to me until I had. That is one of the things I'll have in mind the next time I read it.
I should mention something that might not be expected, which is that the book is very funny in places. One of the central relationships is that of the liberal father Stepan Trofimovich and his radical son Pyotor Stepanovitch. The latter is dangerous, and the former in the end gets more of our respect, but the opening chapters of the book involve some very sharp satire of the liberal who wants to think of himself as bold and dangerous but is actually perfectly tame.
Light On Dark Water 
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