The Devils, The Possessed, Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I have been reading The Devils, Demons, The Possessed by Fyodor Dostoyevsky this last month. I don’t mean three books just the three translations available to me made by Magarshack, Peavar & Volokhonsky, and Garnett. The first named is quite readable and light on patronymics which are a boulder in the way of smooth reading. The Garnett has a period flavour which is not out of place for a novel serialised through 1870. I find no real difference between the latter two translations. I switched back and forth between them all. The Magarshack is the more literary, possibly easing the original feverish and hasty writing of the original. Garnett lacks the chapter variously called “Stavrogin’s Confession” and “At Tikhon’s”. That is an important omission when considering the character of Nikolai Vsevolodovich (Stavrogin). Considered as a portrayal of the damage done by paeodophile grooming it puts the elegant Nabakov in the shade. (I must reread Pale Fire.) Given in both translations as an appendix which is a little scholastic consisering that Dostoyevsky wrote it as the chapter after Ivan the Tsaravitch (Crown Prince). It wasn’t originally printed as being too shocking for 1870 and for me the depiction of the invitation into the soul of evil, relishing it and then in the end being destroyed by it, is very powerful.

The critical cliché about Dostoyevsky is his ‘lumpy structure’, scrambled narration and so on. That, as I have remarked before in other connections, is entirely false but the diabolism of it is that it is true after its own fashion. All of the novel is the work of the active imagination and reflects the chaos and evil tumult of the conspirators. Are they the pigs that the devils have entered into or are they the devils awaiting the Gadarene swine? The theme of counterparts could be explicated at great and tedious length. The humour of ‘skandaly’ (outrageous scenes) is there as well as pathos. Read it every seven years and always find more.