Dostoevsky’s Devils: A Study in Evil

Dostoevsky, who in his many other works has shown that he is no stranger to the extremes of rage and aggression, in this novel portrays evil, not simply as the expression of individual psychopathology nor as the societywide eruption of innate aggression or irrationality, but rather as a perversion of rationality, an unintended byproduct of the Enlightenment, which has stripped Man of Faith in the name of Progress and left him, instead, with a moral vacuum into which can rush the ideological devils of the age. Evil is a distinctly human phenomena, something we are capable of only when we are in the grip of an idea.