Despite being a secondary character, he has a surprisingly intimate knowledge of all the characters and events, such that the narrative often seems to metamorphose into that of the omniscient third person.

This, from a Russian nationalist and defender of Tsarist autocracy, and a ‘renegade’ from the revolutionary politics of his youth no less, should give the lie to the idea that only Marxists have true foresight into the future, despite what Alan Woods and his lackeys in the IMT claim. Of Pyotr Verkhovensky, Dostoevsky said that the character is not a portrait of Nechayev but that "my aroused mind has created by imagination the person, the type, that corresponds to the crime. Pyotr Stepanovich meanwhile is very active in society, forming relationships and cultivating conditions that he thinks will help his political aims.Although a merciless satirical attack on various forms of radical thought and action, Demons does not bear much resemblance to the typical anti-nihilist novels of the era (as found in the work of Nikolai Leskov for example), which tended to present the nihilists as deceitful and utterly selfish villains in an essentially black and white moral world. What emerged was a prophetic and ferociously funny masterpiece of ideology and murder in pre-revolutionary Russia-a novel that is rivaled only by The Brothers Karamazov as Dostoevsky’s greatest.

Andrey Antonovich von Lembke is the Governor of the province and one of the principal targets of Pyotr Stepanovich in his quest for societal breakdown. Shatov, on the other hand, once looked up to him as a potentially great leader who could inspire Russia to a Christian regeneration. In the book, I saw so many parallels between my own experience as a member of a revolutionary organisation, and that of the characters. His magnetic personality influences his tutor, the liberal intellectual poseur Stepan Verkhovensky, and the teacher’s revolutionary son Pyotr, as well as other radicals. The speech amounts to a declaration of love, reaching a climax with the exclamation "Stavrogin, you're beautiful!Many of the other characters are deeply affected by one or other of the two aspects of Stavrogin's psyche. He invites Kirillov, and subsequently Shatov, to a meeting of the local branch of the society to be held later that day. By flattery, surrounding her with a retinue and encouraging her exaggerated liberal ambition, he acquires a power over her and over the tone of her salon. As Dostoevsky wrote to a friend about the novel, “What I’m writing is a tendentious piece, I want to speak out rather more forcefully.

If only the leaders of the Russian Communist Party had been more like Shigalyov and had backed away from the horrors of forced collectivisation and the purges when they still had the chance. According to translator Richard Pevear, the demons are "that legion of isms that came to Russia from the West: idealism, rationalism, empiricism, materialism, utilitarianism, positivism, socialism, anarchism, nihilism, and, underlying them all, atheism. He is unwillingly involved in Pyotr Stepanovich's plans, and his inept attempts to extract himself via approaches to the authorities are another cause of his eventual murder. Constance Garnett's 1916 translation popularized the novel and gained it notoriety as The Possessed, but this title has been disputed by later translators. Whilst I admire his powerful psychological portrait of the Russian revolutionary tradition, and his biting criticisms of said tradition and where it was heading, I can’t go along with his broader, more reactionary agenda – to rehabilitate Tsarism, Orthodox Christianity and Russian imperialism.A particularly nice touch is how Pyotr Stepanovich boasts that he has tricked his subordinates into thinking that they are part of a wider organisation with branches all across Russia, affiliated to the Internationale (no doubt based on Marx’s own, which was reaching its end just as Dostoevsky was writing).