Books+ Fall 2026

I used to write about most of the books I was reading, but I’ve scaled back to writing about the one or few that scream for a public airing. Right now, that’s one book from Dostoevsky. I went on a minor author binge over the last year, and this one stands out.

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Demons by Fyodor Dostoevsky, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

This is a book that’s home for me. I am not suggesting that I live among the demonic; rather, few books capture the waft and walk of the different characters drawn to the highly political left as well as this one does, and that’s the world I grew up in, once upon a time. So, it’s refreshing in the darkest possible way to read such an astute and bleakly humorous tale of nihilism and Utopianism, even if reading Russian writers is about as comfortable as entering a cha-cha-cha contest for me. Dostoevsky’s story about two generations of materialists tumbling toward conspiracy and murder in a Russian city in the late 1800s is one that needs to be told—somehow, though probably not in its current form—now. The problems that darken our collective spirit today are not new.

Demons is not a page-turner, but a few scenes made me laugh out loud, and the rest were resonant. One of my favorite scenes is the account of an ambitious aristocratic lady giving a literary fête, complete with an over-hyped choreographed "book dance" that goes horribly wrong. The rickety pet ideas of the enlightened meet the messy reality of the masses, and eventually the building burns to the ground. The chapter reminds me of the many instances we’ve seen over the last decade of the high and mighty being exposed as clothes-less on social media, often by some guy with an account called “Jeffrockssocks89.” I appreciated the many insightful details of the immolation. Dostoevsky is not without love for his characters, even the worst of them.

So, while there is a great deal to analyze about the origin of the evil committed in this book. I won’t get into that here, except to say that I appreciate that Dostoevsky doesn’t shy away from describing the variety of awful women in this story along with the men, and quite well. No one is spared his critical eye. Witness this excellent capture of the spirit of a certain aspect of the toxic feminine:

“She dreamed of giving happiness and reconciling the irreconcilable, or, more exactly, of uniting all and sundry in the adoration of her own person.” (p. 344, description of Yulia Mikhailovna, the woman who hosted the literary fete, an advocate of "new ideas")

Sound familiar? Perhaps she’s your co-worker?

I also found myself nodding along to this description of the fundamental recipe of the political organizers in the book:

“‘… each of the active groups, while proselytizing and spreading its side-branchings to infinity, has as its task, by a systematic denunciatory propaganda, ceaselessly to undermine the importance of the local powers, to produce bewilderment in communities, to engender cynicism and scandal, complete disbelief in anything whatsoever, a yearning for the better, and, finally, acting by means of fires as the popular means par excellence, to plunge the country, at the prescribed moment, if need be, even into despair.’” (p. 547)

It is the juxtaposition of engendering “complete disbelief in anything whatsoever” and “a yearning for the better” that strikes me most. The most disturbing recipe for evil. This tension is a bleak place on the personal level and the launching pad for devastation en masse. Best avoided.

Demons is good medicine, if you can stomach Dostoevsky's all-night, wild dance.