Encountering the Spirit of Revolutionary Negation

The 150th anniversary of the publication of Dostoevsky’s Demons (also known as Devils and perhaps less accurately as The Possessed) provides a welcome opportunity to reengage this timely and timeless literary dissection of moral and political nihilism. In it, Dostoevsky gathered all his imaginative and prophetic powers to confront the spirit of radical negation that defines the modern revolutionary project. This powerful novel is at once an unerringly accurate diagnosis of the sickness of soul that drives the totalitarian temptation as well as an inexhaustible literary monument to the ideological scourge that is coextensive with late modernity. It is at moments darkly humorous even as it delves into spiritual and political pathologies of the first order.