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Part 2, Chapter 4, Section 3
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Demons, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Politics and Self-Interest
Ideology and Extremism
Morality and Nihilism
Herd Mentality
Atheism vs. Belief in God
Summary
Analysis
In the weeks leading up to the literary gala thrown by Yuliya, she is almost constantly accompanied by Pyotr, Liputin, and a clerk named Lyamshin, who runs errands for her. The public atmosphere in the town is abuzz with a strange energy. During those weeks, there have been several pranks and other events that have put people into a kind of fervor. Many of those pranks are related to the social circle that has been regularly gathering in Yuliya’s drawing room. At those gatherings, Lyamshin often performs music and does impressions, including an unflattering impression of Stepan that brings down the house.
This passage directly links the “strange energy” in town to the abundance of recent pranks and to the literary gala that Yuliya is planning, foreshadowing later events in the novel. The fact that those pranks originate in the social circle that frequents Yuliya’s drawing room also suggests that the pranks may, in some way or another, be related to Pyotr and the revolutionary faction of which he is the leader.
Themes
One of the recent pranks in town involves Lyamshin. One night, an icon of the Virgin Mary behind a protective grate goes missing, and someone replaces the icon with a live mouse, which is taken as a disturbing kind of sacrilege. Everyone blames Fedka for the theft, but people say that Lyamshin is also involved. The next day, a couple of the pranksters go to town when a monk is collecting alms. The pranksters approach the monk, laughing and talking loudly. One of the men takes a low-value coin from his wallet full of bills and tosses it to the monk before walking away. Liza witnesses the event. After the men leave, she goes up to the monk and gives him her diamond earrings.
This prank directly relates to sacrilege and denigrating religious symbols. In a previous section, Shatov argued that socialism was incompatible with religion and therefore must be based on a foundation of atheism. With that in mind, the prank involving the icon can be interpreted as an attempt to destabilize the public’s relationship with religion by questioning the (from the revolutionary’s point of view) taken-for-granted sanctity of Christian iconography.
Themes
