Demons (Penguin Classics)

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His greatest success is with the Governor's wife, and he manages to gain an extraordinary influence over her and her social circle. Fools reproach me for having hoodwinked everyone here with my central committee and ‘numerous branches’. He launches into an incoherent monologue, alternately passionately persuasive and grovelingly submissive, desperately pleading with Stavrogin to join his cause.

Unsurprisingly, Lenin hated Dostoevsky and regarded him as a loathsome reactionary (Stalin and Trotsky appreciated him more). Varvara Petrovna stops him imperiously and, indicating Marya, demands to know if she is his lawful wife.

He points to their own undeniable involvement and tells them that Shatov is also determined to denounce them. Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky is the son of Stepan Trofimovich and the principal driving force of the mayhem that ultimately engulfs the town. In late 1860s Russia there was an unusual level of political unrest caused by student groups influenced by liberal, socialist, and revolutionary ideas. Shigalev's notion of human equality, the "earthly paradise" in which nine tenths of humanity are to be deprived of their will and turned into a slave-herd by means of a program of inter-generational 're-education', had a contemporary prototype in the ideas of Petr Tkachev.

The downtrodden, crippled and half mad Marya had fallen hopelessly in love with him and he had responded by treating her "like a marquise". As teachers and strong personalities, Stavrogin and Stepan Trofimovich influence those around them, and thus the demons enter the swine. Praskovya arrives, accompanied by her nephew Mavriky Nikolaevich, demanding to know why her daughter has been dragged in to Varvara Petrovna's "scandal".The character of Shatov represents a Russian nationalist response to socialist ideas, and was initially based on Nechayev's victim Ivanov, but later on the contemporary slavophile ideas of Danilevsky [43] and to some extent on Dostoevsky's own reformed ideas about Russia. Stavrogin, while he seems to accept Pyotr Stepanovich acting on his behalf, is largely unresponsive to these overtures and continues to pursue his own agenda.