Demons Under Western Eyes

INCOMPREHENSIBLE horror sparks a frantic search for com- prehension. Among the bookish, this search often takes the form of a hunt for literary parallels. Accordingly, in the aftermath of September 11, one found many invocations of Dostoevsky and Zola, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.

Dostoevsky’s great novel Demons (1871) was inspired part- ly by the brutal murder of a student by an anarchist-terrorist called Sergei Nechaev. In Zola’s novel Germinal (1885), an exiled Russian nihilist called Souvarine sets off a bomb that floods a mine, killing many. In The Princess Casamassima (1886), James presents Hyacinth Robinson, an impoverished aesthete, who is seduced by radicals working for a German terrorist. Conrad portrayed anarchist terrorism in both The Secret Agent (1907), which features a plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, and Under Western Eyes (1911), whose character Peter Ivanovitch offers a chilling portrait of evil incarnate. (Conrad called him and another character “apes of a sinister jungle.”)

About the Author

Roger Kimball

Mr. Kimball is publisher of Encounter Books, and co-editor and publisher of The New Criterion.

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INCOMPREHENSIBLE horror sparks a frantic search for com- prehension. Among the bookish, this search often takes the form of a hunt for literary parallels. Accordingly, in the aftermath of September 11, one found many invocations of Dostoevsky and Zola, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.

Dostoevsky’s great novel Demons (1871) was inspired part- ly by the brutal murder of a student by an anarchist-terrorist called Sergei Nechaev. In Zola’s novel Germinal (1885), an exiled Russian nihilist called Souvarine sets off a bomb that floods a mine, killing many. In The Princess Casamassima (1886), James presents Hyacinth Robinson, an impoverished aesthete, who is seduced by radicals working for a German terrorist. Conrad portrayed anarchist terrorism in both The Secret Agent (1907), which features a plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory, and Under Western Eyes (1911), whose character Peter Ivanovitch offers a chilling portrait of evil incarnate. (Conrad called him and another character “apes of a sinister jungle.”)