The demons (Dostoevsky)

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The Demons ( Russian Бесы Bessy ) is a novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky published in 1873 . The title is often translated as Evil Spirits , The Devils or The Possessed (see section "Title" ).

The book describes the political and social life in pre-revolutionary Russia of the late 19th century , when, under the increasing instability of tsarist rule and traditional value systems, various ideologies ( nihilism , socialism , liberalism , conservatism ) collided, each of which is represented by a protagonist by Dostoyevsky .

title

The book has been translated into German several times. An early translation from the beginning of the 20th century comes from Elisabeth Kaerrick under the pseudonym EK Rahsin , who chose the title The Demons . Later translations by Hermann Röhl and Marianne Kegel retained this title. However, there is also a transmission by Hermann Röhl under the title Die Teufel . Partly the title was also translated as The possessed . Swetlana Geier translated the book in 1998 under the title Böse Geister .

The original title Бесы refers to the evil spirits of Russian folk mythology who can take possession of the living. The book is preceded by the passage from the New Testament ( Lk 8,32-36  EU ) in which the devils drive out of a person and into a herd of swine, who then throw themselves into a lake and drown. The translation The possessed is thus as inaccurate as The Demons , since demons in the Western European tradition have a different meaning than the evil spirits of Russian sagas. Dostoevsky himself makes this distinction in the novel.

Emergence

Dostoyevsky combined two different novels he had worked on in The Demons . The first is about his literary treatment of the murder within a revolutionary group. In this true story, at the instigation of the nihilist Sergei Nechayev, a young member of his group, the student Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov, was murdered by his comrades. Nechayev's intention was to simultaneously eliminate a critic and to weld the group together through the collective murder. The character of Pyotr Verkhovensky and the events surrounding his revolutionary group in The Demons are based on Nechayev and the murder case. The second text, which was used as Stavrogin's confession in The Demons , was originally a religious novel. Stavrogin, torn by internal contradictions, reveals his doubts about God and all morals to a clergyman.

Table of contents

The novel is divided into three parts. The first introduces the characters, v. a. the educated aestheticist Stepan Trofimowitsch Verkhovensky, who is oriented towards classical ideals and lives with the wealthy widow Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina as a former tutor of her son and friend. In the second part, the conflicts between the protagonists are developed, which finally break out in the third.

The action takes place in an unnamed province near Saint Petersburg and is told by the official Anton Lavrentjewitsch, a friend of Stepan's, who has witnessed some events and conversations himself, but was mostly informed about the events indirectly, through eyewitness reports. In many chapters this formal construction takes a back seat to a multi-perspective representation .

Warvara's son Nikolai Stavrogin returns, and with it the main story begins, after a dissolute life, first in St. Petersburg, later abroad, morally sensitized to his homeland. The signs of his ambivalent personality structure and the resulting relationship problems intensify after it becomes known that he is secretly married. Allegedly on a whim, during his time in St. Petersburg, he married Marija Timofejewna, the crippled and mentally ill sister of the drunkard Lebjadkin, and supports her financially without loving her and living with her. Lebjadkin has now moved to the city with his sister, and Marija expects Nikolai, her idealized noble prince, to recognize her as his wife (2nd part, 2nd chapter THE NIGHT, continuation, 3rd section). As a result, Warwara's plans to arrange his marriage to the wealthy and in love with him Lisaweta Tuschina fail. In order to clear away an obstacle to such a connection, a suspected relationship between Nikolais and her ward Darja Schatowa, she encourages her house friend Stepan through financial promises to woo the young woman (Part 1, Chapter 2 PRINZ HEINZ THE BRIDAL SALES), but what he sees through and finally rejects after the matter has become public through a targeted indiscretion of his son directed against the father.

This son of Stepan Trofimowitsch, Pyotr Stepanowitsch Verkhovensky, appears at the scene at the same time as Nikolai. Under the mask of the protagonist's friend and admirer, he intrigues on various sides and aims to overthrow all secular and religious authorities. To do this, he unscrupulously uses a conspiratorial group of five (the officials Liputin, Lämschin, Wirginsky, his brother-in-law Shigalev and Tolkachenko, a railway employee), who also include the student Shatov, the engineer Kirillow and the intellectual Shigalev. Pyotr lies to them that he is one of thousands of revolutionary cells spread all over the country, controlled from a secret center, which in turn is linked to the world revolution being prepared in Europe. With the help of Stavrogin, who is supposed to play the role of Tsarevich as a savior for the people (2nd part, 8th chapter Tsarevich IVAN), he wants to establish a political system designed by Shigalev in which 90 percent of all people arise through unrest throughout the country the most primitive level of existence have to work and be fully controlled by the remaining 10 percent. Because without discipline, no progress is possible in Russia. The Shigalevism should the general equality through dictatorship and dehumanization created; Dostoevsky expresses his contempt for authoritarian socialism. The different argumentation of the revolutionaries is u. a. presented at a meeting in the house of Wirginsky (Part 2, Chapter 7 WITH THE UNSURIGIOUS).

In the second part, the conflicts Stavrogin triggered are revealed by bringing together the people whose hopes or disappointed expectations are focused on him as the focal point of the novel. On the one hand there are the ideological controversies between atheistic anarchy and orthodox belief, on the other hand personal relationship aspects: Ivan Pavlovich Shatov is torn between contempt and veneration for Stavrogin, through whom he wants to have his faith in God again (2nd part, 1st Chapter THE NIGHT, 6th and 7th section). He finds the same position as the Potschwennitschestvo movement, which Dostoevsky was close to, and thus becomes a deviator. He was deeply offended by Stavrogin's relationship with his wife Marija, but is reconciled with her when she shows up with him, terminally ill and pregnant, and takes her and her child into his home (Part 3, Chapter 5 A TRAVELER) . Shatov's feeling of happiness about his small family - Marija's son is supposed to get his name Ivan - is already overlaid for the reader by signs of the coming calamity. Nikolai is the point of reference for further unfortunate networks from which he cannot break and which lead to a tragic end for most of the people affected: (Mawrikij ↔) Lisaveta, (Varwara ↔ Stepan →) Darja, (Lebjadkin ↔) Marija Lebjadkina.

Pyotr uses such tension for his own ends. He also puts the escaped murderer Fedjka on Stavrogin. The latter suggests killing Lebjadkin and Marija to pave the way for a new marriage with Lisaveta (Part 2, Chapter 2 THE NIGHT, Continuation, Section 4). He declines the offer, but the potential perpetrators feel encouraged by Nikolai's indecisive attitude to pursue their goal. Stavrogin becomes entangled in new actions with tragic consequences, although he is actually trying to free himself from his evil spirits and to come to terms with his past. So he asks Darja (Dasha), Shatov's sister, for forgiveness for his past and future crimes. She persuades him to speak to the clergyman Tikhon, in whom Stavrogin confesses his inability to believe and love and the abuse of a young girl whose suicide he did not prevent. (The 9th chapter of the 2nd part BEI TICHON was censored in the first version of the novel by the authorities as blasphemous and immoral, which is why it is only in the appendix in some modern editions.)

Meanwhile, Pyotr Verkhovensky made contacts with the new governor Andrei von Lembke and his wife Julia (Part 2, Chapter 6: PYOTR STEPANOWITSCH IN ACTIVITY), won their trust and used them for his revolutionary plans and his personal accounts. In revenge for the neglect he suffered, he wrongly denounced his father to be a revolutionary, so that he was temporarily arrested. However, he did not achieve his great goal of winning Stavrogin over to his cause and making him the leader of the movement.

The third part begins with a festival organized by the governor, consisting of a morning reading and an evening ball, which by Pyotr Verkhovensky degenerates into provocative debauchery (3rd part, 1st and 2nd chapters THE FESTIVAL: THE MATINEE and THE END OF THE FESTIVAL). The event is interrupted by a fire that Fedjka started to cover up the traces of the murder of Marijas and Lebjadkin. That same night Nikolai meets Lisaveta on his estate. She disavowed her fiancé Mavriky Drozdov and decided to live with her lover. However, when she learns about the fire and Stavrogin confesses to her that he did not prevent the murder of Marija, she rushes with Mawrikij to the crime scene, where she is slain by angry onlookers as the alleged instigator (Part 3, Chapter 3 A COMPLETED ROMAN) .

Pyotr Verkhovensky succeeds in getting Alexei Kirillov to take the murders of Maria, her brother and Shatov on himself and dictates a false confession to them before his suicide (Part 3, Chapter 6 THE TROUBLE NIGHT). He has developed his own philosophy and declared that he would kill himself to prove to everyone that God does not exist. Man be free and God himself. ( Albert Camus calls Kirillow's project an educational suicide ).

Before doing this, Pyotr suggests to the group that Shatov wants to betray them and persuades them to execute him. He then fled to St. Petersburg, while the members of his group, tormented by remorse, remained behind and were eventually arrested after a member of the police confessed the truth.

The disgraced Stepan Trofimovich decides to leave the city. On his journey he falls ill (Part 3, Chapter 7 STEPAN TROFIMOWITSCH'S LETZTE WANDERSCHAFT). Varvara Petrovna tracks him down and brings him back to her house. Before his death, they confess their secret love that had been suppressed for years.

Although Dasha agrees to live with Nikolai in Switzerland, he hangs himself, like the girl he seduced, because of his increasingly unbearable feelings of guilt, which he constantly sees as 'evil spirits' in hallucinations (3rd part, Chapter 8 THE CONCLUSION), about the long list of people who were directly or indirectly destroyed by him.

Translations into German

  • Hubert Putze: The possessed - Dresden: Minden 1888
  • EK Rahsin : The Demons - Munich: K. Piper & Co 1906, 1952–1963 revisited.
  • Hermann Röhl: The Devils - Leipzig: Island 1921
  • Gregor Jarcho: The Demons - J. Ladyschnikow Verlag , Berlin 1924
  • Marianne Kegel: The Devils - Leipzig: Hesse & Becker 1924
  • V. Hirschfeld: The demons - Berlin, Darmstadt: German book community 1925
  • Waldemar Jollos: The Demons - Zurich: Artemis 1948
  • Ilse Tönnies: The Demons - Berlin: Vollmer 1961
  • Rose Herzog: The Demons - Zurich: Stauffacher 1962
  • Burkhard Busse: The possessed - Cologne: Lingen 1984
  • Günter Dalitz: The Demons - Berlin, Weimar: Construction 1985
  • Swetlana Geier : Böse Geister - Zurich: Ammann 1998, ISBN 978-3-596-14658-1

reception

The demons was included in the ZEIT library of 100 books .

Theater and film adaptations

Others

Web links

Sources and Notes

  1. ↑ Transcription according to the DUDEN table
  2. ↑ Mikhail Bahktin: Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics . Translated from the Russian by Adelheid Schramm. Hanser, Munich 1971. ISBN 3-446-11402-5 .
  3. ↑ after the transfer from EK Rahsin
  4. ↑ In Part 2, Chapter 5 “Before the Festival” there is a duel between the Marseillaise and the song O du dear Augustine . This scene is the model for the vocal duel in Casablanca , see http://pov.imv.au.dk/Issue_28/section_2/artc10A.html . For his part, Dostoyevsky is said to have used some verses from Pan Tadeusz as a model , see Waclaw Lednicki: Russia, Poland and The West . Hutchinson, London 1950, pp. 306 .
  5. ↑ Marina Kogut: Dostoevskij in German. Comparative analysis of five German translations of the novel Besy. In the appendix, the author's interviews with Swetlana Geier and Egon Ammann . Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 2009 (= Heidelberg publications on Slavic studies. B. Literature series. Volume 35)
  6. ↑ Demons. (No longer available online.) Schauspiel Frankfurt , archived from the original on February 17, 2015 ; accessed on February 17, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.schauspielfrankfurt.de