ABSTRACT
Dostoevsky is the greatest ever novelist of the demonic. The theme bulks large in Russian literature and culture in general, with Lermontov’s poem ‘The Demon’ telling its story of a tragic, forbidden love between a demon and a mortal woman called Tamara. This was later turned into a turbulently potent opera by Rubinstein. Then there is Gogol’s portrayal of the Devil in Dead Souls as Chichikov: an amiable rogue with fine sideburns! There are Vrubel’s extraordinary paintings of a beautiful, morose and – above all – massive demon in various predicaments and attitudes; two of them feature in and on the cover of this book. Not to mention Tolstoy. As this may already suggest, in Russian the demonic exists in simultaneously everyday and magnified forms. In Fedor Sologub’s novel The Petty Demon, evil is stripped of all transcendent glamour; and ‘[w]hen all is said and done, or tried and tempted,’ writes Simon Franklin, ‘the [Russian] Devil is a loser’. 1 Nonetheless, the prototype of the Romantic demon, Milton’s Satan, was, for instance, admired by the Decembrist revolutionary Kiukhelbeker; and also the Marxist Lunacharsky, even though the latter had little time for his Russian equivalent, Lermontov’s demon, whom he dismissed as a self- obsessed whinger. 2 Dostoevsky, for his part, saw the demonic as a terribly real threat working through the ordinary operations of culture. In 1873, he remarked to Varavara Timofeevna, his co-worker on the journal Grazhdanin, following a discussion about the penetration of European influences into Russia: ‘They don’t suspect that soon it will be the end of everything, of all their “progress” and idle chatter. They have no inkling that the Antichrist has already been born … and he is coming! ... The Antichrist is coming among us! And the end of the world is close – closer than people think!’ 3
