Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horrified Russians in 1869, Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a "novel-pamphlet" in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What emerged was a prophetic and ferociously funny masterpiece of ideology and murder in pre-revolutionary Russia.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a Russian novelist, journalist, and short-story writer who had an immense influence on 20th-century fiction. He is commonly regarded as one of the finest novelists who ever lived, penning classics that include: Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. His ideas profoundly shaped literary modernism, existentialism, and various schools of psychology, theology, and literary criticism.