![]() My main struggle with Dostoyevsky is that he tries to do so much in his later novels, and the plots are all tangled up. In Demons, the main “chronicle” doesn’t even start till well after page 200. The narrator is a minor character but sometimes the point of view seems to change to omniscient. Belknap helpfully relates each of the three parts of Demons to general “type” of story – the society novel, the anti-nihlist novel, and the psychological novel. No wonder I had so much trouble in the middle! Society novels (or comedies of manners) and psychological novels exist in all times and across genres, while the anti-nihlism stuff is pretty specific and harder to relate to (or maybe I just don’t read political novels). ![]() This introduction is straightforward and helped me understand several points that would otherwise have been lost in the many, many plots and characters. Introduction focuses on how and why Dostoyevsky wrote Demons.Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky in 1994.#Demons21 participant Adam Moody also read this edition, and provides a great review, just as illuminating as these intros, including a discussion of relating Dostoyevsky to what’s going on in modern America, which is hard not to do. This introduction frustrated me, even though I found it really interesting. Frank uses all kinds of primary sources to illustrate how Demons came to be its beginnings as a “pamphlet novel” about nihlism and extremism, its merging with another planned novel about athiesm, and how its publication was delayed by a dispute over a controversial (and icky) chapter in which a character makes a disturbing confession. This was all fascinating stuff, and helped me understand why Dostoyevsky wrote Demons, but it didn’t help me much with my understanding of it. If this was the only introduction I read, I think I’d still be confused by how the novel itself works. Introduction focuses on the themes and literary devices used.I guess if I want to really get into Fyodor’s life, I should read Frank’s five volume, 2,500-page biography… or maybe just the 984-page abridged version. It was also my least favourite, because it was trying to do a bit of everything, and because Pevear loves to use fancy words (I had to look up “adumbrated” among other words.) I appreciated his discussion of the title (Constance Garnett translated it as The Possessed, Pevear explains his reasoning for going with Demons) and the meaning behind the character names (Dostoyevsky never chooses names randomly!) Pevear’s introduction is probably the most balanced of the three, incorporating some literary theory and “how to read” type clarification like Belknap’s intro, and some of the same biographical details like Frank’s. I also don’t find Vintage Classics’ geometric cover designs very attractive, so there’s that. LITERARY DEVICES IN BOBOK DOSTOYEVSKY HOW TO.
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