In this he imitates the immediately preceding generations of educated and influential Russians, who have self-indulgently squandered the moral and spiritual inheritance of more than two millennia. A jokester filches grapes from the dead boy’s plate a lady insists that “there’s no need to be punctilious about entertainment, as long as it’s diverting.” (I quote from the 1994 Knopf translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.) Sent to town to buy items for his sister’s trousseau with money saved up for decades and entrusted to him with “exhortations, prayers, and crosses,” the boy had blown it all on gambling, Gypsies, cigars, and Château d’Yquem. On the way to visit a notorious “holy fool,” some bored young ladies and gentlemen and their entourage of buffoonish low officials and petty clerks stop their horses at a hotel to gape at the corpse of a nineteen-year-old village boy who has shot himself. At its sesquicentennial, Dostoevsky’s novel is as fresh and urgent as it was in 1871.ĭemons is a theater of societal decay. The United States has long avoided such fits, but it seems our hour has come round at last. This suicidal clownishness is characteristic of late modernity since the French Revolution, an epoch in which convulsions of ideological insanity have periodically torn apart physical and political bodies across the globe. Despite their ugly pranks, scandalous libertinism, and incendiary radicalism, they are until the apocalyptic denouement indulged and flattered by their elders: liberal elites who suppose that proximity to the “new ideas” will get them noticed in the highest social circles of progressivist Petersburg. That’s just how it is in Dostoevsky’s Demons, in which a band of young nihilists and socialists unleashes murder, riot, and arson in a provincial Russian town. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed-amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke. ![]() He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. They thought it was a joke and applauded. In a theater, it happened that a fire started offstage. ![]() A disillusioned romantic in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or offers this parable:
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