Demons

But, um, uh, I, I think this is very profound.

And, uh, Dostoevsky, it's actually in, in reference to, uh, The Demon or The Possessed, um, great novel that, that he's, he's talking about here.

It is also clear that such an outcome, while easing the atmosphere of evil in the world, in no way resol- in no way resolves the problem of true resistance to evil, but only removes from the agenda isolated situations and conflicts, the acuteness of which lay precisely in the fact that the good is forced to fight evil on both fronts, without at all confusing its own objective interests with those of both evil adversaries.

It's sort of like, um, that it's been Islam that's been at war with Israel.

... quoting Brothers Karamazov, I feel like.

No, it's The Devils.

Oh, was it The Devils?

Yes.

Oh, was Letyagin in The Devils?

Uh, yeah.

Stop quoting Dostoevsky and speak, speak English.

It meant people who had signed on to a materialist, atheist, revolutionary, socialist ideology, right? If you weren't a socialist or an anarchist, at least, you, you weren't a member of the intelligentsia, right? So Leo Tolstoy, who believed in God, would certainly never have counted as one, right? Um, and Dostoevsky wrote novels about these people w- whom he was watching.

And hi- you know, his most famous political novel, which some people think of as the greatest political novel ever written, "The Possessed," or "The Demons," as it's also...

You could translate it either way, um, deals with a real-life incident of a group of terrorists, you know, which was real terri- He based it on some real events.

And, uh, in this novel, it's become particularly famous because one of the terrorists outlines his plans for what they're going to do when they seize power.

I love to read.

I just got done doing a 10-week online course taking people through Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Demons, great novels, and then last year I did the same thing with The Brothers Karamazov, for which there were 1,600 registrations for that course, so.

My goodness.

Yeah, that book-

He predicted the catastrophe of the Communist revolution, like, 60 years before it happened, which is just a, it's absolutely unimaginable feat.

He did that in a book called The Devils, or The Possessed, and in many of his other books as well, not least in Notes from Underground.

He, he, he, he was commenting on this building that, that was erected in London at the world's, at the, at the, at the, at the, I think it was 18, 18, late 1800s world exhibition.

They built the first modern glass and steel building.