Dostoevsky’s Demons and The Catechism of a Revolutionary

A live performance based on the masterpiece of Russian literature that blurs the lines between good and evil.

Calvert22 invites you to join a live performance in collaboration with SplitMoon Theatre company alongside their new production of Demons, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s tragic satire of Russian radicals which blurs the lines between good and evil.

Two actors from the SplitMoon ensemble will perform a dramatised version of the chapter The Tsarevich, which Dostoevsky developed out of Sergei Nechaev’s Catechism of a Revolutionary. The dramatisation is written and directed by Peter Stürm and based on the translation by the two-time PEN Prize-winning Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

A short introduction to the evening will be followed by the performance and a lively discussion on the topics.

When the young revolutionary Sergei Nechaev escaped from the authorities in Russia he met Mikhail Bakunin in Geneva in 1869. The two men struck up a close friendship and they composed the Catechism of a Revolutionary, which had a huge impact on subsequent generations of revolutionaries worldwide, including Lenin and Stalin. In his novel Demons, Dostoevsky satirises the radicals, in particular Nechaev, whose jury trial in Moscow he followed closely. Nachaev and his cell were eventually convicted for the murder of their former co-conspirator Ivanov and sentenced to hard labour in Siberia. Some twenty years earlier Dostoevsky himself was sentenced to death for conspiracy but pardoned by the Tsar.