Dostoevsky begins writing The Demons as an evil anti-nihilistic pamphlet, but breaks out of the genre and creates one of his best novels - a political thriller, a satirical action movie, a religious drama and an existential tragedy under one cover. After the revolution and the Civil War, The 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. The main opponent of The Demons was Maxim Gorky, who branded the novel reactionary and socially harmful and thus created the Soviet tradition of its perception. Back in 1913, demanding to ban the production of The Demons at the Art Theater, he called Dostoevsky an evil genius, and his novel one of the "dark spots of malicious misanthropy on the bright background of Russian literature."