For a long time after writing, "Demons" remained a novel, the reading of which depended on the political views of the reader and often on which side of the Soviet border the reader was on. Having conceived a work for the malice of the day, the classic created it "for the malice of the ages." It all started with the murder of student Ivan Ivanov, a member of the revolutionary society "People's Massacre", by his own circle members for his unwillingness to participate in another action. The event caused a great resonance in society, and Dostoevsky took up the novel as an evil anti-nihilistic pamphlet. But under the pen of the master, the work turned into a psychological thriller and a social drama of the world. A world in which people have lost harmony and meaning, feeling the fatal influence of new ideas and being, in the words of writer Vasily Avseenko, "internally unsound natures, struck by the impotence and infertility of semi-education." A story for all time.