Meanwhile, Dostoevsky made attempts at revision which left the question of an actual rape uncertain, hoping this would be enough to satisfy 'the modesty' of his editors; he also read this chapter to his literary friends to obtain their advice (which later led to ugly and totally unfounded rumors, handed down to posterity, that he was actually confessing a misdeed of his own). Continuing to forge ahead with the remainder of the book, he wrote on the assumption that his contested chapter would be accepted in its revised form; but publication continued to be delayed. It was only a year later, just before publication resumed, that he received a definitive refusal, and he then worked frantically on the galleys to give his remaining text whatever coherence he could.

One addition, made at the last moment to the original manuscript of Part Three, is of some importance - the scene in which the dying Stepan Trofimovich listens to the reading of a passage from St Luke (Dostoevsky also uses this passage as epigraph), about the devils entering into a herd of swine and drowning in the sea. It is under the inspiration of this passage from the Gospels that the repentant Westernizer declares himself to be one of the devils, and perhaps their progenitor. It is possible that, if Dostoevsky's initial chapter 9 had been accepted, he would have assigned more responsibility to Stavrogin, whose social-cultural coloration makes him the far more plausible (and historically accurate) source of Dostoevsky's ideological devils. The original plot assignment of Stepan Trofimovich as Stavrogin's tutor, who is thus presumably the cause of all the moral-ideological maladies of his pupil, is obviously a structural hangover from the earlier plan before the Prince had been transformed into Stavrogin and taken over the book.

However that may be, chapter 9 vanished among Dostoevsky's papers and was only unearthed in 1922, although parts of it (the dream of a Golden Age of innocence, mirrored by a classical Greek landscape taken from Claude Lorrain's painting, Acis and Galatea) were used in A Raw Youth. There has been a continual dispute over whether it still belongs to the book, but the consensus is that it should certainly be read if we are to grasp the moral-philosophical inspiration underlying Dostoevsky's remarkable character. For here we see, as one variant of the chapter tells us, that Stavrogin was not simply a perverse moral monster; he was, rather, carrying out a sacrilegious moral-philosophical experiment on himself to ascertain whether it were true that 'I neither know nor feel good and evil and that I have not only lost any sense of it, but that there is neither good nor evil (which pleased me) and that it is just a prejudice.' Dostoevsky wrote in a letter that 'I took him [Stavrogin] from my heart', and in my view he meant a heart that was aching because the glamorous radiance of this 'product of the Russian century', the finest flower of the Russian absorption of European culture, should have been doomed to such a tragic destiny.

Demons is thus a totally original amalgam, one part of which contains a brilliantly ironic depiction of the conflict of generations in Russian culture and displays all of Dostoevsky's still insufficiently recognized talents as a satirist and a parodist. The portrait of Stepan Trofimovich is unsurpassed in the Russian novel, and the more one knows about the Russian culture of the period the more one marvels at Dostoevsky's intellectual sophistication, skill and sureness of touch. The foibles, the weaknesses, the impotence, the self-pampering pretensions of the personage are all there, and the jibes of Pyotr Verkhovensky against his father hit home time and again. One also laughs at the tempestuous vagaries of his beautifully Platonic relationship with his strong-willed patroness; but we are also shown the genuine sweetness of spirit, the occasional pangs of conscience, and the sincere devotion to the ideal.

For all his detestation of his own generation, Dostoevsky much preferred it to the cold, Utilitarian, Nihilist rationalists of the 1860s; and the final chapter of Stepan Trofimovich's last wanderings is a wonderful mélange of tender mockery and slyly humorous reverence. It is also, incidentally, a totally unintended but prescient foreshadowing of what would actually occur a year later, when a new generation of young radicals decided 'to go to the people,' and were met by them with the same bewilderment that greeted the itinerant scholar. Dostoevsky is more pitiless with the figure of Karmazinov, a caricature of Turgenev, with whom he had a personal bone to pick; but there were also ample social-cultural reasons in the mid-1870s to motivate Dostoevsky's lampoon. The parody of Turgenev's prose-poems perfectly catches their mannerisms and is hilariously funny; so is the entire boisterous helter-skelter of the fête scene, with its wicked takeoff on Karmazinov's world-weary farewell to literature that nobody takes seriously. Such a large-scale assault on a fellow writer has no rival, except perhaps Dickens's attack on Leigh Hunt in the Harold Skimpole of Bleak House, with which Dostoevsky, a great reader of Dickens, was certainly familiar.

Dostoevsky combines all these pages of irresistible satirical comedy with what seems to be their very opposite, the tragic theme of an unsuccessful quest for religious faith and personal salvation by 'a great sinner'. He has often been criticized for attempting to unite what seems, at first sight, to be such disparate material; but this criticism misunderstands the nature of his genius, and measures him by standards that are quite irrelevant to his poetics. Dostoevsky was one of the few novelists of the nineteenth century (rivalled in this respect perhaps only by Balzac) who could still feel the universe and human life as directly related to the ultimate questions about human life that are posed and answered only by religion. This is one reason why, in reading him, one is so constantly reminded of works produced in the great eras of poetic tragedy, when the relationship of man to the gods or to God was so much more instinctive and spontaneous. In general, characters in the novel do not usually relate their own mundane problems and dilemmas so immediately to the 'accursed questions' that always remained in the foreground of Dostoevsky's purview.

It is no accident that, in The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan speaks nostalgically of the time when 'it was customary to bring down heavenly powers on earth' in literature, and mentions Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris as a modern novel in which a mystery play of this kind is depicted — one in which the Virgin Mary descends to earth. Dostoevsky, it might be said, tried to do the same with the world of the Virgin Mary (or to use a more Russian appellation, the Mother of God) in his own mode of 'fantastic realism', which remained within the realistic conventions of the nineteenth-century novel but enormously extended their usual range. He made realism 'fantastic' by using the extreme situations of melodrama or the criminal adventure novel, which he then elevated to the level of high tragedy by handling their sordid conflicts in terms of the transcendent values of religious faith. For him, the Machiavellianism of Pyotr Verkhovensky, purely social-political in nature, issued the same challenge to the moral basis of human life and society as did the personal experiment of Stavrogin to abolish his feeling for the distinction between good and evil. Both, in Dostoevsky's imagination, derived from the Western rationalism that he saw as inevitably leading to the replacement of the God-man Christ, with his morality of love, by the Man-god of egoism and power embodied in Stavrogin, Pyotr, and most nobly of all in Kirillov. It was because Dostoevsky possessed so acute a sense of this relation between the religious and the social that he was able to create the unparalleled and artistically viable synthesis between his 'pamphlet' and what he later called his 'poem', which was unfortunately weakened - though by no means destroyed - by the suppression of chapter 9.