An ideal continuation of "Crime and Punishment," whose ethical-religious inquiry into the subject of freedom it deepens in a social and political sense, "Demons" is Dostoevsky's most polemical work. The philosophy that asserts that everything is permitted here becomes the revolutionary theory that political action is above good and evil. Through the novel's protagonists, Dostoevsky takes in the whole storm of doubt, denial, and criticism that invests modern man. But he also knows that man possesses the values to emerge from the crisis. His whole work is a dramatic dialogue between negativity and positivity, a dialogue that is the essence of mankind.