Book review | The retranslated classic novel reminds us that even Dostoevsky has humor

Novel

Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Demons: A Novel in Three Parts. Besy. Finnish Martti Anhava. Big Dipper. 2024. 632 p.

Otavan publication of new Dostoevsky Finnish translations started about fifteen years ago, and now it’s our turn Demons (1872), where Fyodor Dostoyevsky is at its most satirical and political.

So much happens in the fascinating novel that it is difficult to give a brief description of its plot. The essential plot line is about how a group of conspirators try to disrupt life in a rural town. A lot of human drama revolves around it.

Demons is a mystery novel in its own special way: it talks a lot about ideas, and in it you can find people who believe in the most diverse ideas.

There is the engineer Kirillov, who is about to end his days and has created a peculiar philosophy around suicide. Kirillov’s thinking greatly fascinated the writer Albert Camus. There is a former revolutionary Shatov, who now believes in the special position of the Russian people in the world. There is still the revolutionary Šigaljov, in whose ideal society a small minority controls the whole society.

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Even the most unpleasant people are always portrayed humanely.

However, they are side characters. The more important characters are the master of political manipulation Pyotr Verhovenski and the mysterious Nikolai Stavrogin, on whom people pin their hopes. Stepan Verhovenski, Pyotr’s father and Stavrogin’s former teacher, represents the older generation.

Even the most unpleasant ones people are always portrayed humanely. The fact that Dostoevsky is still both read and appreciated is based a lot on his portrayal of people.

There are plenty of people, and it doesn’t help to follow the plot if the same person is called by different names throughout the book. Fortunately, there is a personal list at the end. I myself often use thick Russian classics when reading English Wikipedia pages.

In Demons reflects the political and cultural debate of his time, much more and more directly than in Dostoevsky’s other novels. Dostoyevsky scholar Joseph Frank wrote that Demons is like a compact encyclopedia of the Russian culture of that time.

However, various cultural phenomena, especially ideas, are shown as exaggerated, grotesquely distorted and objects of satire. Dostoevsky first planned a kind of pamphlet novel from the book.

Many references and meanings related to history will of course be missed by the Finnish reader of the 2020s. How much does it hinder the reading of the novel?

The historicity of works of art is sometimes talked about in a slightly arrogant tone – that how it is not possible to properly understand a book if you do not know the context of its creation or the world it describes very well.

However, you should remember that classics are classics in general precisely because they have been removed from their time and place. Jane Austen’s and by Charles Dickens novels are still read, among other things, because they tell about things that are known elsewhere than in 19th-century England: human weaknesses and strengths, wealth and poverty, people in society, wrongs, misfortune, families and love.

Demons the modern reader may not recognize many references to Slavophilia or to the nihilism that Dostoevsky was deeply opposed to. But on the other hand, the modern reader’s attention can be drawn to more general questions: How do people become supporters of different ideas? How do ideas and ideals affect each person’s life? How do people understand their own actions and responsibility for their own actions? What are guilt and innocence?

Depicting these types of subjects is an important reason why new translations of Dostoyevsky’s novels appear.

From some we partly understand Haunters even better than its original readers. We have a more modern understanding of the human mind, and we know how to interpret characters in a more multidimensional way. We know what has happened since the book was published. We can invest Demons part of both Russian political history and European intellectual history.

We also read the book through everything we have learned about terrorism, extremist groups and radicalization.

Of course, these types of readings easily lead to incorrect readings. We can place something in a novel that isn’t really there. But if we are not researchers, this may not be too bad.

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One of the strangest misconceptions about literary classics is that Dostoyevsky isn’t funny.

Demons is not nearly as good a book as Dostoevsky’s greatest masterpieces Crime and Punishment (1866) and The Brothers Karamazov (1880). Demons is overcrowded, overlong, sometimes exhaustingly chatty and strangely messy in structure. The first quarter of the book feels like an introduction to the real thing.

In his afterword, a Finnish translator Martti Anhava points out that very few like Haunters as my favorite Dostoevsky.

However, it has its own kind of attraction, ferocity and unreasonableness. Dostoevsky mixes shameless melodrama, suspense and secrets, heated intellectual debates, deep and creepy gloom, satire and farce. One of the strangest misconceptions about literary classics is that Dostoyevsky isn’t funny. This, as in many other novels of the author, has great amusing episodes.

The book at the end, there is a chapter as a separate appendix, which Dostoevsky’s publisher refused to publish at one time and which was not published for the first time until 1922. It describes the sexual abuse of a minor and the resulting death, and then discusses remorse. The chapter puts many of the events in the book in a new light.

The wild text reminds us of Dostoevsky’s special place among the classics. Compared to other great realists of the 19th century, Dostoevsky was willing to go further and look deeper.