“And I proclaim,” Stepan Trofimovich shrieked, in the last extremity of passion, “and I proclaim that Shakespeare and Raphael are higher than the emancipation of the serfs, higher than nationality, higher than socialism, higher than the younger generation… ”
With this outburst at a provincial fête, Stepan Verkhovensky — one of the main characters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Demons — seals his fate as the enemy of political progress, in the eyes of a movement he’s loved all his life. It’s one of a list of comic twists in a critical portion of the novel, which Brad Pearce and I will be back discussing today.
