Dark Shadows Fall, One Upon The Other
The power of ideas
An important lesson from history is that people living in relatively stable and functional societies seldom understand how rapidly things can deteriorate and plunge into catastrophe, violence, and mass murder.
A real-life individual named Savva Morozov (1862–1905) was one of the wealthiest men in pre-revolutionary Russia.
He was a textile magnate, a patron of the arts, and a genuine philanthropist. His Moscow mansion was said to be the most expensive in the city. He and his wife, Zinaida, hosted famous writers, composers, and scientists. Morozov also worked to improve conditions for workers in his factories. He gave pregnant women paid leave. He funded scholarships for students. He built a hospital and a theater for his workers. He pushed for constitutional reform: freedom of the press, freedom of association, workers’ rights to organize and strike, and public oversight of the state budget.
Morozov also bankrolled the Bolsheviks.
Reports from this period suggest he gave hundreds of thousands of rubles to the revolutionary cause. He personally financed an underground newspaper of the banned social-democratic party that would eventually become the Russian Communist Party.
Morozov’s goal was almost certainly not to ignite a civil war or hand power to a dictatorship. He likely saw the radicals as useful pressure on the tsar, a way to force real reforms from a regime that would not move on its own.
When revolution came in January 1905, the violence shocked him.
He had set forces in motion that he could not control.
He suffered a nervous breakdown and fell into depression. His doctors and family sent him to the French Riviera to recover. He checked into a hotel in Cannes. There, he apparently shot himself, though rumors persisted for years that he had been murdered and the suicide had been staged.
His wife Zinaida returned to Russia and continued living off the enormous fortune her husband had left behind. Then came 1917. The Bolsheviks seized everything. She survived by selling off the few pieces of jewelry she had managed to keep.
The lavish country estate she and her husband owned later became the personal residence of Vladimir Lenin, leader of the communist revolution. Today it is a museum called Lenin’s Gorki, filled with the possessions and mementos of the first leader of the Soviet Union.
In his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, Peter Turchin points out that in most cases of societal collapse and state breakdown, “the overwhelming majority of precrisis elites…were clueless about the catastrophe that was about to engulf them. They shook the foundations of the state and then were surprised when the state crumbled.”
Everything Collapses
Devils by Fyodor Dostoevsky (also translated as Demons and The Possessed) is a novel divided into 3 parts. We’ve discussed Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
This is a discussion of Part 3 of Devils, in which Dostoevsky’s portrait of political radicalism is brought to its catastrophic conclusion.
Recall that in Devils, the older generation of liberals espouse a mild form of progressivism. They are well-read, shaped by Western European ideas, and fond of gathering in pleasant surroundings to discuss injustice and inequality over a glass of wine. They believe in reason, equality, and gradual reform.
But much of this is performance. Their beliefs serve as a kind of badge, a way to show that they are thoughtful and morally serious people. They praise radical ideas, but they like the sound of revolution more than its consequences.
By attacking tradition and chipping away at trust in long-standing institutions, the middle-aged liberals of Devils hollow out the moral and cultural foundations their children will inherit.
When these children of affluent liberals come of age, they do not follow their parents into comfortable moderation. Instead, their kids, now in their twenties and early thirties, become enamored with socialism, atheism, and nihilism.
What had been building beneath the surface of Devils erupts in Part 3. Over the course of a few days, everything falls apart. Fires spread across the town. People are beaten, robbed, and executed. Others are coerced into false confessions. The tone shifts from satire to something closer to horror.
At the center of it all is Pyotr, the organizer of the local radical cell who has been pulling the strings from the beginning. As the chaos peaks, he flees the consequences, leaving behind a broken group and a town in ruins.
Marya Lebyadkin (the disabled woman married to Nikolay Stavrogin) and her brother are murdered by Fedka, a low-level criminal. Liza (engaged to Mavriky but in love with Stavrogin) is killed by a mob that believes she helped arrange Marya’s death so she could run off with Stavrogin.
Fires break out. People are shot. Others take their own lives. Each disaster feeds the next.
What is striking is how little of this is driven by ordinary people.
The radical cell is made up almost entirely of the sons (who I describe in Part 1 as “radical zoomers”) of intellectuals and aristocrats (“moderate boomers”).
When peasants and workers do occasionally appear in the story, they are simply living their lives. They do not debate systems or propose dramatic reforms. The gap between them and the radicals is wide and obvious.
The revolutionary fervor is not rising from “the people.” It is being conceptualized and imposed by a small group of educated men who are obsessed with abstract ideas.
The younger generation seems to be acting at least in part on parental failure and personal resentments.
Pyotr at one point says to his father, Stepan, in essence, “Why would I help you? You were never there for me.” There is real bitterness there. I discuss this in my review of Part 1.
Dostoevsky’s question, by the end, is hard to ignore. What happens when a generation is raised on negation, skepticism, and wholesale abandonment of tradition? Part 3 offers a clear answer.
The Tragedy of the Well-Meaning Intellectual
In the midst of all the chaos and violence, Part 3 slows down during Stepan’s final days. Stepan, recall, is an aging washed-up intellectual in his fifties who failed in his duties as a father to Pyotr and as a quasi-stepfather to Stavrogin.
Stepan leaves town on foot and begins what he imagines as a spiritual journey. He pictures himself walking out into the countryside, meeting peasants, and reconnecting with something real.
Earlier in the novel, Stepan imagines himself as an intellectual rebel, someone important enough to be monitored by the authorities. He likes to think of himself as a dangerous and influential figure. In reality, no one is paying attention.
On this final journey, the performance becomes complete.
While walking along a roadside, Stepan first encounters two peasants on a cart. He thinks to himself, “It’s strange that I feel as it were conscience-stricken before them, yet I’ve done them no harm.”
Stepan feels guilty in front of them even though he has never personally wronged them. His guilt is abstract. It comes from a vague awareness of class difference, from the sense that his life has been easier than theirs.
There is sympathy in it, but also distance. Moral concern mixed with liberal condescension.
This dynamic still feels familiar. You see versions of this today.
When the peasants explain that their cattle died in a plague, Stepan responds, by saying something like “Oh, yeah, that happens to you Russians.” Then he catches himself and corrects it: “No, I mean we Russians.” He speaks as if he is observing his own country from the outside rather than living inside it.
Even 150 years ago, cosmopolitan intellectuals felt detached from their own countries, viewing their fellow citizens through an anthropological lens colored with condescension.
At the same time, there is something almost innocent about Stepan.
You see this in small moments. When he arrives at a cottage, Stepan orders pancakes and vodka. He imagines that the peasant woman serving him takes a natural pleasure in it. He believes he understands her. He says, “I always know how to get along with the peasants to perfection, to perfection.”
Many years ago I witnessed a professor at an elite college, a Gen X white guy, boast to his students that he got along better with black people than with white people. He expressed this as a point of pride. Unsurprisingly, the students saw right through it.
Near the end of his journey, though, Stepan finally admits the truth about himself:
“I’ve been telling lies all my life. Even when I told the truth, I never spoke for the sake of the truth, but always for my own sake. The worst of it is that I believed myself when I am lying…The hardest thing in life is to live without telling lies and without believing in one’s lies.”
Here we have one of the clearest statements of self-deception in the novel. Stepan is not just lying to others. He is lying to himself, and he believes those lies.
Among all the characters, Stepan comes closest to a real redemption arc. He does not save anyone. He does not undo the damage he has inadvertently caused. But he gains a kind of self-awareness.
What makes this moment powerful is the contrast with what comes just before it.
Prior to skipping town, Stepan attends a literary event hosted by Yulia, the governor’s wife.
Stepan confronts the radicals directly. He does not try to impress them or position himself alongside them. He pushes back.
The young radicals respond by calling him an “Agent provocateur.” In modern terms, they accuse him of being a government plant, a “fed.” The charge, of course, is revealing. Anyone who does not fully accept the socialist framework must be working for the enemy.
Stepan rejects this. He argues that Shakespeare matters more than boots, that art and beauty are not luxuries but the highest achievements of civilization. This is exactly what the radicals cannot accept. For them, everything must be reduced to material needs and political struggle.
Dostoevsky then shows how the crowd responds:
“To begin with, there was a furious volley of applause. The applause did not come from all, probably from some fifth part of the audience…The rest of the public made for the exits, but as the applauding part of the audience kept pressing forward towards the platform, there was a regular block. The ladies screamed. Some of the girls began to cry and asked to go home.”
In other words, these women listening to Stepan, the moderate liberal intellectual condemning their radicalism, were literally shaking.
The scene breaks down into noise and panic.
Stepan’s position explains the reaction. He is not a radical, but he is not a defender of the old order either. He has sympathy for new ideas but cannot follow them to their extremes. In today’s terms, he resembles a classical liberal, someone who believes in culture, in art, in gradual progress, and who finds himself attacked by those who are further left than him.
In this moment, he does something he had not done before. He tells the truth as he sees it.
At this same literary reading, a visiting professor takes the stage. He is theatrical, trying to present himself as a dangerous radical. But the narrator cuts right through it: “There is nothing he likes better than exhibiting the bankruptcy of Russia in every relation before the great minds of Europe. But he regards himself at a higher level than all the great minds of Europe. They’re only material for his jests.”
This is a critique of the Russian intelligentsia. They borrow ideas from Europe and use them to attack their own country. Criticizing your own society to impress Europeans (who are viewed as more enlightened) becomes a way of signaling sophistication.
Of course, this has never, ever, happened in the U.S. Our intellectuals would never glaze foreign countries and denigrate our own.
The Architect of Chaos
Pyotr (Stepan’s son) is the mastermind of the radical cell. He more or less succeeds in his aim of creating chaos while escaping any responsibility.
He becomes a fugitive, but a comfortable one. He boards a train to Petersburg. At one point, he is even invited into a first-class compartment by a well-placed passenger. He accepts without hesitation.
Behind Pyotr, though, is a trail of destruction.
Marya Lebyadkin (the disabled woman married to Nikolay Stavrogin) and her brother are found murdered. A low-level criminal named Fedka carried out the killings, but Pyotr set the conditions.
Liza’s death follows a similar pattern of chaos and misreading. The crowd blames her for Marya’s murder, believing she wanted Marya gone so she could be with Stavrogin. A mob forms. She is beaten to death.
Liza’s story has its own internal logic. She is drawn to Stavrogin, and becomes entangled in his emptiness. She moves toward danger on her own. Not exactly suicide, but close to it. Something like “suicide-by-criminal,” placing herself in a situation where her destruction becomes almost inevitable.
Pyotr wanted to create disorder for its own sake. He ties people together through shared guilt, pushes them toward violence, and then abandons them.
Earlier, we contrasted Pyotr with Stavrogin. Stavrogin is charismatic, physically striking, and effortlessly draws people in. Pyotr is the opposite. He is not personally appealing. He does not seem to have close relationships. There’s no sign he has ever been romantically involved with anyone.
Instead, he finds satisfaction in manipulation.
Pyotr even explains part of his method. He talks about how he rambles on purpose, how he makes himself appear less intelligent than he is. This lowers people’s defenses. They underestimate him. They trust him more easily. And that makes them easier to control.
The broader movement in the novel reflects this fragmentation. It is not a unified ideology. It is a loose alliance of socialism along with different flavors of nihilism.
There are political radicals who claim to believe in a new social order.
There are abstract thinkers like Shigalov, who construct elaborate theories about how society should be reorganized according to a socialist framework.
There are philosophical figures like Kirillov, who take ideas about freedom and existence to advocate for “rational” suicide. And then there is Stavrogin, whose nihilism is personal and internal, a kind of moral emptiness.
What unites all of these characters is that they no longer believe in the old structures. They have lost faith in religion, in tradition, in any stable vision of the future. This creates a moral vacuum. And in that vacuum, different people respond in different ways.
Pyotr chooses destruction.
One of the clearest windows into Pyotr’s mind comes during the discussion about whether to murder Shatov, a former radical who the group believes will betray them to the authorities.
A man named Virginsky initially resists.
He says, “With all my soul and strength, I protest against such a murderous decision.” It is a direct moral objection. But Pyotr does not argue against it in any straightforward way. Instead, he manipulates the conversation.
Pyotr responds, “But?”
Virginsky asks, “But what?”
Pyotr says, “You said, ‘but,’ and I’m waiting.”
The trick is simple. Virginsky never said “but.” Pyotr inserts it, as if it were already part of Virginsky’s statement. This creates pressure. Virginsky starts to doubt himself.
He then replies, “I don’t think I said that. I only meant to say that if you decide to do it, then—”
Pyotr interrupts again: “Then?”
By falsely accusing Virginsky of saying “but,” Pyotr tricks him into explaining what he “really meant,” which leads to his capitulation.
Virginsky then goes on to say, “I am for the cause.”
The radical cell comes to an uneasy consensus: We must kill Shatov.
Pyotr plans the murder of Shatov for two closely related reasons.
First, Shatov is a liability. He has broken with the group and could go to the authorities. That alone makes him dangerous.
But that is not the full story.
Pyotr is also trying to bind the group together. By pushing them to commit murder, he ensures that they are all tied together by collective guilt.
Romanticizing What You Cannot Fully Inhabit
Shatov’s story is one of the most emotionally intense in the novel.
Shatov represents a different response to the same crisis that affects every other major character. Whereas Stavrogin dissolves into callous indifference and Pyotr into manipulation, Shatov tries to rebuild a sense of meaning.
As mentioned in Part 2, he comes across as a kind of stand-in for Dostoevsky himself.
In Part 3, his estranged wife returns after three years of separation. She is pregnant with Stavrogin’s child. The situation could easily be treated with bitterness or resentment. Instead, Shatov helps care for her during childbirth. He is overwhelmed with emotion that she has returned to him.
At the same time, there is a clear sense of loss in her character.
The book’s description of Shatov’s thoughts about his wife:
“He looked at her features with anguish: the first bloom of youth had long faded from this exhausted face. It’s true that she was still good-looking—in his eyes a beauty, as she had always been. In reality, she was a woman of twenty-five…the light-hearted, naive, and good-natured energy he had known so well in the past was replaced now by a sullen irritability and disillusionment, a sort of cynicism which was not yet habitual to herself, and which weighed upon her.”
My read here is that Stavrogin is a psychopathic vampire who drains people of youth and life.
Elsewhere, the book comments on the topic of women aging.
At one of the novel’s social gatherings, an old general remarks: “As a rule, there’s an irregularity about female beauty in Russia…These rosebuds are charming for two years when they are young…even for three…then they broaden out and are spoilt for ever…producing in their husbands that deplorable indifference which does so much to promote the woman movement.”
In other words, husbands lose interest in their wives (because they get fat), which then drives women to feminism. It’s unclear how much Dostoevsky himself endorses this way of thinking. The general who makes these remarks is making snide observations about female appearance while society collapses around them. His banal chatter contrasts grotesquely with the unfolding catastrophe.
Returning to Shatov, he knows his wife has given birth not to his own child but to Stavrogin’s but he plans to raise it as his own.
One of the characters mockingly describes him as “going in for being a father and a ninny,” meaning he embraces his stepfather role. Today the worst people among the online right would call Shatov a “cuck.”
Dostoevsky seems to treat Shatov sympathetically, even if others do not.
There is also a deeper layer to Shatov’s character.
At one point he says, “Since I cannot be a Russian, I became a Slavophil.” It is a revealing admission. Shatov is, in fact, a Russian.
But what he means by his strange declaration is that he recognizes that his identity is mediated through ideas. He is not organically rooted in the culture he is trying to defend. He has to think his way into it.
Slavophils were Russian intellectuals who idealized Russian culture, Orthodox Christianity, the peasant commune, and traditional Russian values. They were often Westernized intellectuals (spoke French, read European philosophy) who romanticized “authentic” Russian peasant life they didn’t actually live. You can see parallels to this today among conservative elites and intellectuals who have never lived among “the people,” “the heartland,” and “real America,” romanticizing a way of life they’ve never actually witnessed up close.
Shatov’s wife shows flashes of affection toward him but also treats him with undisguised contempt, despite the fact that he is a good man.
She has betrayed him by sleeping with Stavrogin. Yet she speaks to him harshly, almost cruelly. He responds with patience and concern. He asks what he can do. She tells him to stand aside, to be quiet, to leave her alone. When he offers her his bed, she reacts with irritation. When he tries to find a midwife to assist during childbirth, she lashes out again, accusing him of abandoning her.
The tone shifts back and forth between tenderness and hostility.
And yet Shatov remains steady. When the child is born, he is filled with joy, even knowing the child is not his. It is one of the few moments in the novel that feels genuinely warm.
Which makes what follows much harder to watch.
Almost immediately after the birth of the child, everything unravels.
A member of the radical cell arrives at Shatov’s house and asks Shatov to come with him. The group then murders him.
The sequence is abrupt and brutal. The moment of new life is followed immediately by death.
Dostoevsky gives Shatov a deeply tragic fate. He’s vulnerable. He’s humiliated. He’s destroyed. Dostoevsky, I think, is showing the cost of Shatov’s earlier errors. Shatov had been part of the radical circle. He didn’t fully break from it. He has some agency in how he ends up where he does, even if he does not deserve what happens to him.
“Rational” Suicide Becomes a Farce
Kirillov, as we covered in Part 1, developed an elaborate justification for “rational” suicide.
Pyotr needs Kirillov to kill himself. But first he tells Kirillov to sign a confession note claiming responsibility for Shatov’s murder.
An exchange captures the difference between Pyotr and Kirillov.
Kirillov says that the ultimate expression of free will is to kill oneself.
Pyotr impatiently responds, “If I were in your place, I should kill someone else to show my will, not myself.”
Kirillov keeps saying he’ll kill himself but as the minutes pass, Pyotr begins to panic that Kirillov won’t go through with it.
The narrator describes it this way: “Pyotr Stepanovich had by now lost all faith in the suicide.” The phrasing is worth sitting with.
Pyotr had no faith in God, but did have faith in Kirillov’s suicide.
He has built his plan around an expectation, and that expectation is crumbling.
Dostoevsky here seems to be suggesting that even in a world that has rejected religion, people still rely on faith of some kind. They form expectations about what will happen, about how others will act. They build plans on those expectations. When that belief collapses, they panic.
You can see this in Pyotr’s behavior. The calm manipulator starts to unravel because his faith has dissipated.
When the suicide finally occurs, it is chaotic and unsettling.
Kirillov signs the confession before his death, taking responsibility for Shatov’s murder.
Dostoevsky’s Psychopathic Man
By the time we reach the end, Stavrogin (son of the aristocrat Varvara, and, as a child, tutored by Stepan) is already hollow and beyond redemption. We discussed his confession of a horrific crime in Part 2.
Stavrogin’s story ends in suicide, but even that raises questions.
Prior to taking his own life, he writes a letter to a young woman named Dasha. Here, we get a glimpse into his mind, though even here it is hard to know what to believe.
Stavrogin writes, “I’m still capable, as I always was, of desiring to do something good and of feeling pleasure from it. And at the same time I desire evil and feel pleasure from that too.”
He is describing a complete collapse of internal moral structure. Good and evil are interchangeable, reduced to whatever produces the most pleasurable sensations for him.
Then comes a striking claim: “I can never shoot myself. I know I ought to kill myself, but I’m afraid of suicide, for I’m afraid of showing greatness of soul.” He frames suicide as a kind of grand gesture and rejects it for that reason. To him, it would feel performative, inauthentic.
This is where the contradictions emerge.
Stavrogin also writes, “I couldn’t have been one of them,” meaning the radicals, “not because I was afraid of the ridiculous. I cannot be afraid of the ridiculous.” Yet as we covered in Part 2, in his interaction with retired Bishop Tihon, Stavrogin suggests the opposite. Stavrogin is deeply concerned with appearing ridiculous. He is extremely vain.
His letter is difficult to trust. It is filled with claims that contradict both his actions and earlier evidence in the novel. Consistent with our growing understanding of Stavrogin as a nihilist.
He says he cannot kill himself. Shortly after, in the novel’s final pages, he does.
My read here is that Stavrogin has exhausted every experience available to him. He has tried pleasure, cruelty, indifference. He has tried behaving honorably and he has behaved reprehensibly.
Nothing gives structure to his life. Nothing makes him feel anything other than fleeting pleasure, if that. For him, suicide is the next inevitable step.
In his letter, Stavrogin mentions that on some level he admired Pyotr and the radicals because they, unlike him, actually believed in something.
Part of the reason Stavrogin affiliates with them is that they offer him a kind of borrowed purpose.
In the end, his involvement with the radicals was just another way for Stavrogin to pleasurably pass the time and distract himself from his own emptiness and moral rot.
So what is Dostoevsky saying through Stavrogin?
He may be the novel’s purest example of what happens when all moral structure collapses. He is intelligent, handsome, capable, and charismatic. But without any stable internal sense of right and wrong, those traits become dangerous. They enable him to destroy others before destroying himself.
One question that arises here is how Dostoevsky portrays young women in the novel. It is hard not to notice a pattern. The young women in the novel are drawn to Stavrogin in spite of his cruelty and inner void. Liza, who is engaged to a decent man, tries to leave him for Stavrogin. Shatov’s wife becomes pregnant by Stavrogin. Another young woman named Dasha is drawn to him.
I have an answer to what is going on here, which I covered in this piece about Luigi Mangione.
The Power of Ideas: Well-Fed, Well-Born, and Eager to Burn It All Down
Near the end, we finally get a clear statement of what the radicals in Devils have been trying to accomplish all along.
A member of the cell, Lyamshin, confesses to everything.
He explains the plan:
“When asked what was the object of so many murders and scandals and dastardly outrages, he answered with feverish haste that ‘it was with the idea of systematically undermining the foundations, systematically destroying society and all principles; with the idea of nonplussing everyone and making hay of everything, and then, when society was tottering, sick and out of joint, cynical and sceptical though filled with an intense eagerness for self-preservation and for some guiding idea, suddenly to seize it in their hands.”
First, undermine everything. Next, create confusion and chaos. Then wait for society to become desperate. Finally, step in and take control.
Earlier in the novel, Shigalov, one of the intellectuals in the radical cell, makes the same point.
A striking feature of the novel is that the radicals are not the poorest or most desperate people in society.
Stavrogin, Pyotr, and the others are, by the standards of their time, relatively privileged. They are sons of educated intellectuals and aristocrats.
And yet they are the ones captured by these ideas.
They are not talking about wages or hunger or being overworked and underpaid. They’re not saying, “My life is so hard, and that is why I joined this socialist movement.”
This raises a broader point. There’s a strong tendency to explain political extremism in material terms.
People ask whether political rage stems from poverty, or inequality, or some other kind of economic frustration.
But Dostoevsky suggests that ideas themselves can be enough.
This is hard for many people to accept. In his seminal 1958 essay “Two Concepts of Liberty,” the Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote that “Over a hundred years ago, the German poet Heine warned the French not to underestimate the power of ideas: philosophical concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor’s study could destroy a civilization.”
Material causes feel concrete. Ideas are less tangible. You cannot see them or hold them. But they shape how people interpret the world. They define what seems right, what seems possible, what seems worth doing.
In Devils, socialist ideas spread and take hold with enormous force. Imported from Europe, reworked by intellectuals, they moved quickly through a small group and produced catastrophic consequences.
Dostoevsky suggests that once certain ideas take root, they can operate independently of material conditions. They become their own driving force.
Dostoevsky is a master at holding you in suspense as disaster builds toward the inevitable. Describing the experience of reading a Dostoevsky novel, the twentieth-century Russian poet Vyacheslav Ivanov wrote that “the reader often feels as if he were present at a distressing, prolonged, and extremely complicated trial. One must, however, pay this price for the enjoyment—painful, yet so uniquely deep and moving—that one derives from the magnificent works of this singular genius.”
In his diary, Dostoevsky wrote “People call me a psychologist: this is inaccurate. I am a realist in the higher sense: that is to say, I indicate all the depths of the human soul.”
Rob Henderson is a major talent, than which there is no better proof than his 3 part reading of The Devils.