Demons on the Stage

23 October 1913, Nikolai Stavrogin Sets off a Firestorm

Dostoyevsky wrote his novel Demons in the early 1870s. He poured into this work (also known in English under the titles The Possessed and The Devils) his tormented thoughts on the fate of Russia and religion's role in it.

The event that provoked him to write the novel was the trial of the charismatic revolutionary Sergei Nechayev, a man unburdened by the slightest moral compunction. Deceit, murder – Nechayev would stop at nothing to gain the blind obedience of his followers and promote the ultimate goal of revolution. Historians still debate whether the revolutionary was mainly driven by a desire to wield power or by the dream of overthrowing those exercising it.

Like many of Dostoyevsky's works, Demons represented an impassioned call for religious purification as Russia's only salvation, but it was greeted by many of his contemporaries mainly as a caricature of Russian revolutionaries. In fact, it offered a panoramic view of a Russian spiritual landscape populated by inspired seekers of the divine, cynical manipulators, intellectuals feeling disillusioned with God and life, and many other types that would have been recognizable to Dostoyevsky's readers. Not everyone agreed with the novel's ideas, but few denied its genius.

Fast-forward a little more than 40 years. In 1912, one of the founders of the Moscow Art Theater, Vladimir Ivanovich Nemirovich-Danchenko, decided to bring Demons to the stage. The recent success of his production of The Brothers Karamazov, featuring a brilliant portrayal of Ivan by Vasily Kachalov, inspired his confidence that Demons could be successfully adapted to the stage. In producing the script, Nemirovich-Danchenko decided to discard a number of plot lines and focus on the fate of the main protagonist, Nikolai Stavrogin – a sinner and revolutionary who struggles under the burden of his transgressions and atheism and winds up committing suicide. The play was in fact named Nikolai Stavrogin, and the leading role was given to Kachalov.

On October 23, 1913, Nikolai Stavrogin had its debut. The relevance of Dostoyevsky's work was painfully evident. The storms of the 1905 revolution, terrorist explosions and shootings, and the dramatic unmasking of agents provocateurs who managed to penetrate the very heart of the revolutionary underground were still fresh memories. A new outbreak of revolution was widely anticipated. At the same time, many former revolutionaries had abandoned their radicalism and turned to God. The journey from faith to Marxism and back to faith in Christ was a fairly typical one in early twentieth-century Russia, and many religious philosophers of that time had themselves experienced such an evolution. All of this gave Nikolai Stavrogin exceptional poignancy, along with the fact that the text of the great novel was being delivered to the audience by the voices of brilliant actors.

The play was wildly successful, yet Nikolai Stavrogin had its critics. One of the most popular and well-respected writers of the time, Maxim Gorky, was outraged. Gorky, the product of an impoverished and uneducated family, was largely self-taught, but surely understood Dostoyevsky's genius. At the same time, he was, as always, worried about the effect the play would have on the public.

Gorky, who had devoted a great deal of both thought and effort to educating the Russian masses, saw a terrible threat in the staging of Demons by one of the most popular and liberal theaters of the time.

After Brothers Karamazov, the Art Theater is bringing Demons to the stage – an even more sadistic and morbid work. Evidently, Mr. Nemirovich knows that there will be an audience that finds it amusing to see an unimaginative caricature of Turgenev on the thirtieth anniversary of his death and pleasant to look at such "devils from the revolution" like Pyotr Verkhovensky, or at such "scoundrels from their own lives" of the Liputin and Lebyadkin sort; after all, looking at them, it is very easy and convenient to forget that there are honest and selfless people, and it is clear that these days many need this sort of forgetfulness, and now the Art Theater is filling this need – helping society's slumbering conscience to fall into an even deeper sleep.

Growing up, Gorky turned to the great works of Russian literature to help him rise above his hopeless and dreary circumstances, and he later launched several projects to publish the classics, translate the best of foreign literature, and produce biographies of outstanding people – all with the aim of helping the people find themselves and their path in life. But not Demons!

The following question interests me: does Russian society think it necessary and useful in the interests of social pedagogy to portray the events and people described in the novel Demons on the stage?... Dostoyevsky's genius is indisputable and unquestionable, but he is our evil genius. He sensed with amazing depth, understood, and took pleasure in depicting two diseases that the Russian's monstrous history and harrowing and demeaning life have bred into him: the sadistic cruelty of the nihilist disenchanted with everything and – its opposite – the masochism of a forgotten, frightened being capable of taking a certain malicious delight in his suffering and flaunting it before everyone and himself. He was mercilessly beaten and proud of it. …

We live in a country with a motley population of 170 million people speaking 50 languages and dialects; our impoverished people drinks almost a billion worth of vodka every year and it's only getting worse. Is this not one source of the ever-growing hooliganism, which – in essence – is that same Karamazovshchina?*... It is time to contemplate how this lake of poison will afflict the health of future generations – might wild drunkenness intensify the dark brutality of our life, the sadism of deed and word, our flaccidity, our sorrowful neglect of the life of the world, of the fate of our country and of each other?

And now, in the interest of spiritual restoration, it is essential, it seems to me, to determine the social and educational significance of the ideas that the Art Theater proposes to show us in images. Does this disfigurement need to be performed? I am certain it does not. This "performance" is an aesthetically doubtful and unquestionably socially harmful undertaking. I suggest that all people of sound mind, everyone who clearly sees the need to bring Russian life back to health, protest the production of Dostoyevsky's work on the stages of theaters.

For the Art Theater, whose actors worshipped Gorky, as did a large portion of their audience, especially as his plays appeared at the theater and seemed to be an integral part of it, this criticism hit a nerve. The theater replied with an open letter:

It pained us to learn that M. Gorky sees nothing in Dostoyevsky's images but sadism, hysteria, and epilepsy... while Demons for you [Gorky] is no more than a fleeting political lampoon, and that you prefer to charge the great seeker of God and profound artist Dostoyevsky with the defilement of society. Our obligation as a corporation of artists is to point out that those very same "supreme spiritual inquiries" in which you see nothing but idle "eloquence that distracts from vital matters" we see as the theater's primary mission.

This exchange sparked a firestorm in educated Russian society. Nikolai Stavrogin had already brought the most painful and troubling questions of the day into the open. Now, it turned out that two of the intelligentsia's most venerated institutions – Gorky and the Art Theater – were at loggerheads. Most prominent cultural figures took the theater's side. Alexander Kuprin wrote, "I believe that the reason Gorky is interfering in the Art Theater's production of Dostoyevsky's Demons is that he has been too long involved in the Social Democratic Party and has grown accustomed to looking at everything from a certain viewpoint and seeks and finds tendentiousness in everything… Gorky's statement would be understandable for some party activist, but not for a major Russian writer… Maxim Gorky's letter shows a lack of tact both toward the Art Theater and toward those members of the public who revere Dostoyevsky." An indignant Leonid Andreyev wrote to Gorky, "You yourself learned rebellion from Fyodor Dostoyevsky."

At the time, none of the parties to this war of words knew that in just four years Lenin's "demons" would come to power. Gorky, who passionately urged "Let the storm more loudly thunder!" had no idea just what the revolutionary tempest would mean for Russia – or for him. In 1913 his only worry was that Dostoyevsky's world of anguish and gloom might hinder the Russian people's advance toward a bright future.

Who knows? Perhaps if more people had seen Nikolai Stavrogin and read Demons, Dostoyevsky's warnings would not have been in vain.

* A term coined by Gorky in this article based on the title of Dostoyevsky's novel and suggesting some rampant malady.