The undergraduate thesis aims to examine, how, to what extent, and whether at all Demons by Fyodor M. Dostoevsky can be considered a nihilistic novel. In the first part, I concisely present the issue of nihilism as encountered in the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Before proceeding to a detailed analysis of the novel, I briefly present Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the polyphonic novel, which provides us with an important theoretical tool for the ideological interpretation of Demons. In the second and central part of the thesis, I analyze Demons with a particular focus on Stavrogin, who, in my opinion, is the key and most significant character in the novel. It turns out that Stavrogin’s fate is fundamentally connected to questions closely related to those explored by both thinkers of nihilism: Nietzsche and Heidegger. However, literature, especially Dostoevsky’s novels, does not offer definitive answers to these questions. In conclusion, I highlight the essential ideological openness and incompleteness of Demons, in which the question of nihilism – however strongly present – remains unresolved and unresolvable.
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