INTRODUCTION

Britain since the war, and enumerated and annotated by Garth

M. Terry (1), shows that only five or six works out of 295 related directly to political thought.

The purpose of this dissertation is to draw

attention to the importance of Dostoevsky's political

influence, and to elucidate the political philosophy of the novel 'Th_e Devi 1 s' in the context of Dostoevsky's political

and social thought as a whole. In his own day, Dostoevsky's apparently Conservative, Russian Nationalist beliefs

coincided with those of official circles, especially in the last decade of his life when the era of the Great Reforms was

past, and that of political reaction during the reign of

Aleksandr III was approaching. Dostoevsky's close

relationship with Konstantin Pobedonostsev, Procurator of the

Holy Synod, enabled him to provide intellectually

influential, if not always entirely consistent, material for

the ideological armoury of the Establishment. On more than

one occasion, Dostoevsky corresponded with the heir to the

throne (2), during a period when Dostoevsky was crucially

opposed to the 'Western* style of institutional reforms of the early 1860s, and although Dostoevsky always supported the

abolition of serfdom, his last works elevated Russian

cultural messianism to a new level of geopolitical significance (3). All these influences were to prove to some extent operational in the reign of Aleksandr III, which was

overshadowed, as had been the reign of Nicholas I, by

political extremism at its inception. The assassination of

Aleksandr II in 1881, the year of Dostoevsky's death, by the

fighting organisation of Narodnaya Volya, was the proximate

stimulus for the reactionary politics of the ensuing reign,

policies which so crucially delayed the political development of the Russian Empire, and which saw the radical political

socialisation of so many distinguished opponents of the

Tsarist regime (4). However, Dostoevsky's political influence is not

confined to the reign of Aleksandr III. The deeply-held

beliefs about the significance of Russian Literature, the

role of the writer as a voice of the people and the 'native

soil' (5), and the writer's prophetic mission, have exerted a lasting, even hypnotic, influence on Russians' perception of themselves. Many Russians of the first and subsequent emigrations of the 20th century have regarded 'The Devils' as a prophetic novel (6), and equated the revolutionary transformations of society in 1917-21, and subsequently, with the social chaos created by Peter Verkhovensky and his fellow

conspirators. A contemporary example is that of the exiled

theatre producer Lyubimov (7), whose recent (1985) production of a dramatisation of 'The Devi Is' appeared at the Almeida

Theatre, Islington. In a private conversation with Lyubimov,

the author ascertained that Lyubimov drew a direct parallel

between Peter Verkhovensky and Lenin, and between Shigalyov

and Ponomaryov. Such a 'one to one' correlation between Soviet personnel and characters in 'The Devils' may (perhaps) be politically naive, but nevertheless powerful when portrayed by a talented dramatisation.