Srikanth's Reviews > Demons

It has been a long time since I read Dostoyevsky. This a reread since I had not completed it my first time around. Now I liked it a lot. It is a somewhat big book at around 800 pages. Of course he is obsessed about God, evil and redemption. But I felt this is one of his more impersonal novels as he spends a bit of time criticising the nihilistic and revolutionary ideologies and the persons who espouse them. He also makes fun of Turgenev a lot as noted in the footnotes by the translators. The characters also have a lot of range from the two main psychopaths to the ineffectual and naive teacher and his dictatorial keeper. There are a lot of other naive characters who fall victims to the aforementioned psychopaths’ machinations. His criticism of evil, injustice, foolishness, herd instinct and empty ideologies remain relevant today.

Overall, a must read provided you have read his shorter works like Crime and Punishment and Notes from Underground so that you are not off the deep end with this huge book.