What follows is man's replacement of God and the correction of His creation. The third stage of the revolt in the name of unlimited freedom is destruction and anarchism, represented in the novel by Pyotr Verkhovensky. Dostoevsky explored, tested, represented these three stages with extraordinary prescience in Demons. Seeking the greatest good, we do the greatest evil. The demons parody God's world and invert its ends, playing for its loss.
Demons are unoriginal.
They cannot come up with anything new or real. Their lies are copied from sacred truths. They introduce a dreadful buffoonery into the world. The Pevear-Volokhonsky translation of Demons is published by Vintage, as are their translations of The Brothers Karamazov , Crime and Punishment , Notes from the Underground , and Gogol's The Dead Souls . Copyright by Richard Pevear.