Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, in which writers recall wisdom from the past that we should commit to heart. Last week, our farm correspondent Larissa Phillips celebrated the young adult adventure novel The Black Stallion. This week, Benjamin Carlson reveals the central, chilling lesson of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece Demons.
“My dear, the real truth always sounds improbable, do you know that? To make truth sound probable you must always mix in some falsehood with it. Men have always done so.”
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Demons
The first time I read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Demons—which you may know by the equally enticing names The Devils or The Possessed—I was 16, possibly 17. I remember where I was: the rain-spattered porch in the Poconos where my family spent summers. Thick droplets of water thundered on the leaves. And the pages came to life with that revelatory intensity I associate with only a few books in my life: the Bible. The Magus. Siddhartha. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
There was a rumble of thunder. Cool air. The dark summer day enclosed and amplified the raging energy of that weird Russian meganovel—Dostoyevsky’s third masterpiece to be hammered out in an astonishing sprint of genius nearly 20 years after his release from a Siberian gulag. Then and now, Demons is an unsettled, imbalanced, ungainly book that doesn’t even have an agreed-upon name. And I was intoxicated by it.