A NOVEL I DIDN’T UNDERSTAND AT ALL.

A NOVEL I DIDN’T UNDERSTAND AT ALL. I reread THE DEMONS because it was the first novel I read as a freshman in college (The title was translated as THE DEVILS or THE POSSESSED at the time). I could tell then that it was a great book, but I didn’t have a clue what the novel was about. Now, I see why I didn’t. To begin with, as noted, it is a comic novel, and I missed that. Another problem I had was that, as this wikipedia article says, the genre of THE DEMONS is “philosophical novel”, and I was even more out of my depth in philosophy than I am now. (THE WHOLE WIKIPEDIA ARTICLE REQUIRES A SPOILER ALERT). Worse, Dostoyevsky had Slavophil leanings, which I could not comprehend. I was rooting for the wrong characters. The ideas I had encountered until then were those of the Western liberal tradition, and I took the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers for granted. Here was Dostoyevsky, as wikipedia puts it, “portraying their ideas and ideological foundation as demonic….” There were other philosophical issues that left me floundering. One of the characters plans to commit suicide because he believes that “a man who can do this becomes the true God.” Huh. It’s a wonderful book, and, I have to acknowledge, a good introduction to literature and ideas for a naive freshman. But I still feel sympathy for my baffled self.