"Satan drags us here and there... and turns us in all directions"
With these verses from Pushkin, and with a passage from the Gospel of Luke about the demons that entered the pigs, Dostoevsky opens his novel, which he gives the title "The Demons".
As for the demons, they are those who fight over Russia and not for it.
In the year 1871, Dostoevsky published the first part of this novel, and that stage was the stage of divisions and conflicting ideas, where the ideas of socialism grow, and ideas calling for liberation from church authority, and where state authority seems weaker, and Russia sees itself as less than Germany and the rest of Europe.
Through models that Dostoevsky carefully chooses from Russian society, which are models of real personalities in a large part of it, he provides us with a picture of Russian society in those days, and of the wide discussions that were taking place around new ideas, and about the desire to see Russia in the ranks of the most civilized countries, and about The life of the Russian people. Discussions about literary issues, about religion and faith, about good and evil, aristocracy, democracy, freedom of thought, and the struggle between science and religion... constitute the background on which Dostoevsky builds his character models.
Pages: 936
