At one point they desecrate a sacred icon at another, they gleefully gather around the body of someone who has committed suicide and eat the food he’s left behind. Under his influence, the townspeople lose all impulse control and grow reckless, rebelling against all conventions of decency for a good laugh.

In Pyotr, Dostoevsky created a demagogue and pure nihilist, a political figure who appeals to people’s baser desires. What’s most relevant to our time in “Demons” is not its ideologues but the anti-intellectual and impulse-driven nature of Pyotr’s rebellion. Passions are stirred and the local order destabilized as the town enters a downward spiral that concludes with arson and several murders. Pyotr Verkhovensky arrives and persuades many of these same characters to join his underground revolutionary society. The novel begins in a boring provincial backwater inhabited by middle-aged people and ineffectual young liberals, all engrossed in their romantic lives. In 1869, Nechaev orchestrated the murder of a young student, an event that so shocked and angered Dostoevsky that it became the basis for “Demons.” A slippery slope from incivility to violence As Bakunin famously exhorted: “The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too.”īakunin’s conviction that a new world could rise only from the ashes of tsarism was actually put into practice by his one-time disciple, Sergei Nechaev, who was the inspiration for Dostoevsky’s protagonist in “Demons,” Pyotr Verkhovensky. Important public figures, like Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, advocated for destruction of the status quo as an end greater than all ideologies.

One of the only unifying ideas among the more radical left-wing political factions of the period was the belief that the tsarist regime must be eliminated. Sergei Nechaev influenced Dostoevsky’s Pyotr Verkhovensky.

Dostoyevski demons