Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Published 1872 · 1,160 pages · 254,373 words · about 22 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction

How hard is Demons to read?

Demons scores 62 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 65 out of 100
19th-century political and philosophical vocabulary. Many Russian names and patronymics to track.
Sentence structure: 72 out of 100
Dostoevsky's characteristic long, recursive sentences. Conversations spiral with interruptions and tangents.
Abstraction: 75 out of 100
Sustained engagement with political philosophy, atheism, and the sources of Russian nihilism.
Information density: 70 out of 100
Dense with character, incident, and ideological argument. Many subplots and a large cast.
Narrative indirection: 60 out of 100
Chronicle narrator with limited access to some characters' interiority. Stavrogin remains mysterious.
Symbolic density: 70 out of 100
The title itself is symbolic—who are the demons? Images of fire, possession, and the Gadarene swine recur.
Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
Dostoevsky's sympathy is with none of the revolutionaries, creating satirical distance, but the tragic tone predominates.
Resolution withholding: 45 out of 100
Clear resolution: the conspiracy unravels, characters meet their fates. Little ambiguity about what happened.
Structural complexity: 65 out of 100
Three parts with many interlocking plots. The suppressed chapter (Stavrogin's Confession) complicates structure.

How Demons is regarded

Demons holds a literary regard score of 91 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

What Demons asks you to hold together

Demons sustains Formal (11) on the Model of Hierarchical Complexity: a line between variables. It peaks at Systematic (12), a constellation on pages 536–538. Read from the full text, all 510 passages. What the stages mean.

Where Demons sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (510 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Demons scores 88 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.3. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
“I know I ought to kill myself, to brush myself off the earth like a nasty insect; but I am afraid of suicide, for I am afraid of showing greatness of soul.”
Symbol: Anagogic
“That’s exactly like our Russia, those devils that come out of the sick man and enter into the swine.”
Mythos: Tragic Pathos (Irony) iv (irony iv)
“The citizen of the canton of Uri was hanging there behind the door.”
Genre: Novel + Anatomy
“All makers of social systems from ancient times up to the present year … have been dreamers, tellers of fairy-tales, fools who contradicted themselves … Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.”

Where the story of Demons takes place

  • Provincial Russian town and Skvoreshniki estate, c. 1869–70 (autumn climax) (1869 to 1870), the main setting
  • Backstory: Skvoreshniki, Petersburg and Berlin, 1855–1863 (1855 to 1863)

5 things that are true of Demons, with the passage for each

  1. Shigalov's system divides mankind so that one-tenth rules the other nine-tenths.

    One-tenth enjoys absolute liberty and unbounded power over the other nine-tenths.

  2. Shatov is shot in the forehead by Pyotr Stepanovitch, after which two twenty-pound stones are tied to the body and it is thrown into a pond.

    Pyotr Stepanovitch firmly and accurately put his revolver to Shatov’s forehead, pressed it to it, and pulled the trigger.

  3. Kirillov's suicide letter was dictated by Pyotr Stepanovitch to take the blame for Shatov's murder.

    I, Kirillov, declare that to-day, the —th October, at about eight o’clock in the evening, I killed the student Shatov in the park for turning traitor

  4. The novel's epigraph is the Gospel account of the devils entering the swine, which the narrator later says he chose as his motto.

    Sofya Matveyevna knew the gospel well and at once found the passage in St. Luke which I have chosen as the motto of my record.

  5. Stavrogin hangs himself with a soaped silk cord and leaves a note saying no one is to blame.

    On the table lay a piece of paper with the words in pencil: “No one is to blame, I did it myself.”

Scenes in Demons that Frye would name

29 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pharmakos, untitled
At that moment Tolkatchenko rushed out from behind a tree and sprang at him from behind, while Erkel seized him by the elbows. Shatov is the scapegoat sacrificed to bind the quintet.
Displacement, untitled
They are we, we and those … and Petrusha and les autres avec lui … and I perhaps at the head of them Stepan Trofimovitch reads the realistic nihilist plot as the Gadarene myth.
Anatomy, untitled
Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism. Shigalov's system, one of the encyclopedic ideological set pieces.
Masque, untitled
It would be difficult to imagine a more pitiful, vulgar, dull and insipid allegory than this “literary quadrille.” The costumed 'literary quadrille' is a pageant with allegorical dancers.
Sparagmos, untitled
the captain had been found lying dressed on the bench with his throat cut Lebyadkin, Marya Timofyevna and the servant are butchered in the burning house.
Sparagmos, untitled
Liza fell to the ground. We heard a fearful scream from Mavriky Nikolaevitch The crowd lynches Liza at the murder scene.

Books that share these scenes with Demons

About the author

Fyodor Dostoevsky