Review: Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky | Hacker News Reader

Review: Demons, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

thepsmiths.com

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The novel being discussed has been given several different titles in translation [1]. As The Possessed, it can be found and read for free at the Internet Archive [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demons_(Dostoevsky_novel)

[2] https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.18863/page/n2/mode/...

Unfortunately the linked Garnett translation is censored, and then further neutered by the translator who prioritized a very accessible end result at the cost of losing much of the meaning in the source material.

I’d recommend the Penguin Classics Maguire translation, it remains accessible but loses less of the original.

“The Demons” is the more literal translation from Russian.

Yes, thanks. Wikipedia has more about the novel’s title:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demons_(Dostoevsky_novel)#Ti...

This is an interesting review about a great book. I was once holed up sick in the country side with no books left except Demons, and ended up reading it twice back to back.

It is in some ways one of the darkest of his books, and one particular passage was extremely painful to read.

I didn't love the book the first time around but it grew on me, maybe we should always read complex books several times to really appreciate them.

Human nature is a scary thing, but it never changes. Not in 50 years, 500 years or 5,000 years.

Dude only partly got the point of the novel. To get the whole thing you need to know a bit about Dostoevsky. The novel is about himself before he ended up in Siberia for exactly the kind of highfalutin, self-aggrandizing revolutionary liberal bullshit he’s laughing at in the novel. He was supposed to be shot, but the Czar replaced that with exile to Siberia when he and his co-conspirators were already lined up before the firing squad. He went to Siberia a raving liberal revolutionary, spent a few years there, then served in the army for a few years, and returned from there a completely different man, and a staunch monarchist.

Events like this emperor's pardon, in the end, may have led to the fall of the russian czarist regime. If I'm not mistaken, Lenin himself, and even Stalin, were exiled instead of being executed. It looks like it becane a tradition for russian czars to go lenient on the most dangerous people society had produced when it came to their own safety.

No doubt. Though there's also the fact that more violence could have led to a harsh blowback much sooner, as it has in the past sometimes. I'm thankful Dostoevsky in particular was spared execution. He, in my humble opinion, is the greatest novelist to have ever lived, especially if you can read his works in their original language, with no translation loss. I did not always think that - when I was younger I did not have the benefit of life experience to understand the depth of his works, but now, in the second half of my 40s, I can't get enough, and they _really_ speak to me, and make me really reconsider some things at a really deep level. In retrospect it kind of makes sense - Dostoevsky wrote "The Demons" when he was only a few years older than I am now, so I can relate better to it. Following the same logic, I'll have to re-read "Brothers Karamazov" about 10 years from now, and I'm sure I'll get even more out of it then.

> it becane a tradition for russian czars to go lenient on the most dangerous people society had produced when it came to their own safety.

Was it this, or was it that they were imprisoning so may people that killing them all was impractical? Separating the bad from the very bad became rather tricky as the state disintegrated.

> If I'm not mistaken, Lenin himself, and even Stalin, were exiled

Simon Sebag-Montefiore has done a great book about Stalin’s early years [1]. The follow [2] on is good too, but even darker.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/826564.Young_Stalin

[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/282108.Stalin

When it came to Stalin, he was already a full blown terrorist, the type of scum that bragged about throwing grenades on groups of people at a local street fair. Exiling a guy like this, instead of finishing the job, is an inexcusable mistake on the government's part.

Extreme times promote extreme behaviour. He was a terrible human, and the regime he was fighting was too.

The regime he was fighting was far too humane for its own good, that is quite obvious in retrospect. Stalin, however, is not a black and white figure for Russian/Soviet history. On the one hand yes, there were purges, and a large famine on his watch. Millions perished. But on the other he industrialized the country and won WW2, which most likely would be impossible without industrialization. I wish there were easier answers to these moral questions, but there never are if one thinks in more than one dimension

> The regime he was fighting was far too humane for its own good

Compared to communist Russia, maybe, but it was cruel, unequal and badly run by every measure I can think of. I don’t think you can describe it as ‘humane’ by any real measure except comparison with what followed.

Nick Land!

No but I like the review, especially since, even though it appears, at least from this one article, that our reviewer is just some trad-cath reactionary, the critique is all there, and even the reviewers seeming religious position actually transforms into its opposite, as nothing can escape such a totemic worldview of violent forces and powers in various relations that mask themselves amongst individuals that fail to see their collective psyches, or rather that failure is constitutive in their identification with said collective.

I am partial to interesting posthumanist takes, but then again I'm a Hacker News user! I hope the author finds God or whatever (or maybe, God is trans, woooaah, but you never thought of that huh...)

Addendum: I realize that the possibility of freedom from the egregore depends on the recognition of the conditions of possibility of participating in discourse (ie being egregored already), which would then give some level of "freedom" in a practical sense from forces of intelligence that stretch beyond what one normally senses...a very Kantian position. But, after all, Nick Land was a Kantian, so its to be expected.

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