Demons

A conspiracy of nihilists tears through an unnamed Russian provincial town over a few feverish weeks around 1870, from the governor's drawing rooms to a country estate and a murder in the park.

Nikolai Stavrogin

Skvoreshniki, the Stavrogin estate

Part 1

Skvoreshniki is the Stavrogin family seat, the estate Varvara Petrovna keeps and to which her son Nikolai returns from abroad. It is the calm, ordered ground against which the town's disorder plays out, and by the end the park around the house becomes the scene of the conspiracy's worst act. Everything in the novel seems to circle back to this place.

Part 1

inspired by Skvoreshniki is Varvara Petrovna's fictional country house just outside the unnamed provincial town. The town is never named and is drawn from the provincial Russia Dostoevsky knew; we use Tver, a real city on the old Moscow–Petersburg road, as the representative real model. The pin sits on Tver's semi-rural northern edge, the kind of ground where a gentry estate above the river would have stood.

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