“Get Lit” Livestream, 4:30 ET: How Dostoyevsky's "Demons" Described America's Descent to Madness
After the Fourth of July Weekend, Brad and Matt reflect on the plot of "Demons," now gaining steam
“And there’s hatred there, too,” he said, after a moment’s silence. “They’d be the first to be terribly unhappy if Russia somehow suddenly got reconstructed, even if it was in their own way, and somehow suddenly became boundlessly rich and happy. They’d have no one to hate then, no one to spit on, nothing to jeer at!”
— From Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Demons.”
It was strange to read Demons during the most controversial Fourth of July in ages. Americans with money and/or education are more miserable than ever, and the gist of most of the public debates taking place contemperaneously with this past weekend’s fireworks was whether or not this self-loathing is warranted. I don’t remember this phenomenon in my lifetime, but another country went through something very similar once, and one of the world’s great authors captured it and preserved it in the form of an epic political thriller.
Dostoyevsky’s chief characters in Demons are not rich. Most are stragglers whose l…
