Reading Death Pact

Well, that took longer than I expected. I only averaged 15.29 pages/day given my occasional brief hiatuses. Hiati? Breaks.

So.

During a mild griping session about Demons recently, I was gently reminded that a novel is not a film. This remark, while somewhat insulting (literary criticism majors... what else could one expect?), is nevertheless true and criticism of Demons must be relevant to the idiom. However, basic tenets of storytelling have applied since at least Aristotle's time and never mind that there are scores of people who've built academic and artistic careers around flaunting every one of these rules.

But was Dostoevsky's aim with Demons to be a storyteller? In short, did he intend to entertain? I can't think that he did, at least in the overall sense. Portions of the book are, in fact, entertaining. I quite enjoyed the Pyotr Stepanovich character's manipulations, rabble-rousing and general skulduggery. The high school age kids in the political club made me laugh a couple of times with their rhetoric and head-butting. Fedka the Convict was well-written and perhaps the most distinctive character of them all. The latter portion of Book III is actually paced quite briskly and the scenes of mayhem are vivid and engaging. I found Kirillov's suicide, and the scene immediately preceeding, quite riveting.

The characters feel flat because they aren't characters; they're Dostoevsky's embodiment of various ideas he wishes to explore. This can work, if the ideas are themselves interesting. But here is the great flaw in the novel: they aren't. What we're given are caricatures of extremist (and, in the case of Pyotr Stepanovich, entirely hypocritical) thought. Extremism tends to parody itself, of course, so perhaps Fyodor can't be entirely blamed for that. But one of my cardinal rules of fiction is that that which is true is not automatically interesting, hence the craft required to produce a novel/film/poem/etc. which really grabs an audience.

The ideas are uninteresting because they're facile and clichéd. I'm saying this with the benefit (or detriment, I suppose) of exposure to over 140 years of post-Demons writing in which many of these same themes and ideas have been explored, so I am, of course, both jaded and biased. But what really galls me is that Dostoevsky knew people like those he skewers here. He was part of leftist political groups. He was sent to Siberia for political crimes! And while he succeeds admirably in poking fun at and satirizing his former comrades his desire to point out the evil of their ideas devolves them all into shadow puppets. Why couldn't we have an honest look at real people who maybe believe certain things along these lines? Why couldn't we live with them and discover why they felt this way, how they can be easily corrupted by power-seeking megalomaniacs? No, instead, let's have a ponderous thesis on how the abandonment of God creates misery.

Another stumbling block is nothing lesser or greater than time itself. Dostoevsky spends a huge amount of Demons parodizing the works of his contemporaries and even with all the footnotes the value of this is simply lost on those many of us who aren't deeply familiar with nineteenth century Russian literature. Perhaps Dostoevsky's original audience could be expected to point at a passage and exclaim "OH SNAP, TURGENEV!" (or whatever the equivalent may have been), but it's all lost on me.

In summary, Demons is not a bad book. There's quite a lot of beautiful writing in it, for one thing. But it's deeply flawed to my eye. I would be very interested in hearing the perspective of an academic who holds this book up to be a great example of literature and hear what they think is so important about it. I, in my ignorance, can't simply claim there's nothing to it... but I am moved to ask what "it" may be.

Well, I guess that's it. I don't have a lot to say about the denouement. Stepan Trofimovich set himself up as the swine in which to cast out the titular demons, but I don't feel like his death from generic Victorian disease really had any meaning. Like Chris, I don't understand what his character meant or why it took such a major role in parts of the book while being so uninvolved with the central plot.

The conspiracy completely fell apart, and I guess that's the message: the weakness of man and the inevitability of failure in such revolutionary endeavors. I think tomorrow I'll start that food book that Heather recommended.

I'd like to finish this book tonight, but such goals have in the past fallen short of expectation, so I figured I'd share some thoughts now. Also, this way I get to use “penultimate.”

I'm probably behind most of the group at this point, so I'm going to go ahead and talk in particulars instead of generalities. So, if you don't want to know what's happened, you know, here there be spoylers.

I'm at the start of the penultimate chapter. There have been several murders recently, but Shatov's is the one that really matters; that was the one that was to bring the fivesome together. A couple of minor details bothered me through the otherwise engaging sequence of that murder. First, the fivesome itself. I don't know if that number has some historical or numerological significance—Internet says that five represents grace and redemption in the Bible, most notably in Exodus—but it's not the number itself that bothers me; I have a hard time keeping track of who exactly compose the five. The annoying part is that I don't think the actual five even matter; every character in this book, outside of brief bursts of passion, lacks dimension, and most of the characters that have been attending the revolutionary meetings might as well all be the same. Inclusion or exclusion in this inner circle would only serve to create symbols of loyalty or favor for a particular sort of thinking or whatever rather than reveal any more about Pyotr Stepanovich. In fact, I think that the Shigalyov's rejection of the murder was meant to be a message along these lines: he advocated idealism taken to a bloody extreme yet would not condone the killing of someone that wouldn't survive his revolution—a Slavophil and, though Shatov was supposed to be a student, someone seemingly not extremely bright—perhaps because the overt reason for the killing was the survival of the group rather than the betterment of society. The fivesome hasn't really done anything for society other than print some pamphlets, and all of the revolutionary talk they've had had been a sea of nonsense and empty words, the satire of the revolutionary groups.

I guess one of the things of that bothered me initially is that synopses say that this book is satire, and from that I expected the book to be funny. I won't try to discuss the nature of humor or whether it really was funny in 19th century Russia, but the bulk of the book is more of a morality play than a joke. It's satire in that it creates caricatures of the Russians, both the aristocracy and the revolutionaries, and especially their overlap, and Dostoevsky's opinions and lessons are presented by emphasizing absurdities. The annoying part of this technique is that the chief absurdity of the aristocracy is that they're really boring, and, particularly since the narrator is himself part of the idle rich, it's difficult to identify with the writing, making it very boring to read.

Anyhow, the best I can tell is that the fivesome is (or was) Lyamshin, Liputin, Tolkachenko, Virginsky and Shigalyov. Pyotr Stepanovich doesn't count, as far as I can tell, since he's the head of this bizarre organism, and I think I one point Erkel was explicitly excluded from the fivesome, though now he appears to be the new head. Other than Shigalyov, the five characters are basically interchangeable, and I find it kind of weird that I have so little to say about any of them yet managed to spell all of their names correctly without looking them up.

The second thing that bothered me was that the narrator keeps referring to the group as “our people.” This creates an annoying break in the narrative in that it reminds me that the narrator, who isn't involved in the revolutionary groups at all and has been absent for the last couple of chapters, is a character in this story however impossibly; and the emphasis on “our” tries to pull me in along with him. It's probably the second effect that Dostoevsky was aiming for—your crazy thinking will be your doom and all that—but it's a fairly unsubtle way to drive in his point, and it just exacerbates the narrator problem.

On the bright side, even though the narrator manages to wedge himself in to even the scenes where he's absent, it's been pretty interesting the last few chapters, and it's almost over.