Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horrified Russians in 1869, Fyodor 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.

Demons is considered one of the four masterworks written by Dostoevsky after his return from Siberian exile, along with "Crime and Punishment", "The Idiot", and "The Brothers Karamazov".