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Demons · Part One

The father of the demons

FamilyTruth and LiesThe Individual and SocietyRevolution

Summary of the part

These chapters build a genealogy before they build a plot. The chronicler, a townsman who is a friend and confidant of Stepan Trofimovich, tells the professor's life the way one takes apart a pose: a man who imagines himself persecuted without ever having been watched, who did not write the work he promised, and who stays on his feet, or lies down, through the hand of a woman who invented him. Out of this pair come the two sons the novel will stage. The ward, Nikolai Stavrogin, returns from Petersburg like Shakespeare's Prince Harry and at once shows his claws in town, at a club, at a party, and in the governor's office. The blood son, Pyotr, appears only through a letter that demands money. The two fathers, the one who speaks and the one who commands, do not notice what they are creating. The question that runs through these chapters is how much of each character was invented by the one who looks at them, and what happens when the invention stops obeying.

Chapter I: The Idealistic Liberal

FamilyTruth and LiesGod and the DivineRevolution

Chapter summary

The chronicler, a townsman and confidant of the professor, opens the narration by saying that, through his own clumsiness, he must begin from far off: the portrait of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, "talented and much revered," will serve as an introduction, and the story proper is left for later. He always speaks as a "we" of the town, and it is through that "we" that the professor is seen: a man who played a public role and was loved for it. What the chronicler tells, in order, is the life of someone supported by a woman. Stepan believes he was persecuted by the authorities, but he was never exiled or under surveillance; what he actually did was little, a few lectures, a thesis on a German town, a study he never finished, and a youthful poem that circulated without his knowledge. He accepts the invitation of Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina, rich and the wife of a general, to educate her son, and he spends more than twenty years in her orbit, in a friendship of daily letters, quarrels, and reconciliations, in which she governs him and he treats her as both tyrant and mother at once. She dresses him, supports him, shields him from every distress, and never forgives any offense made to him, or by him. A winter in Petersburg, in which the two try to return to the literary world and come back humiliated, and a trip to Berlin, which he cuts short after four months, show that Stepan does not exist far from her protection. Around the professor forms a provincial circle, with Liputin, Shatov, Virginsky, and others, which talks about the future of Russia without costing anyone anything. The chapter ends with a discussion in which Shatov, Stepan's former pupil, accuses him of never having known the people he claimed to love.

Analysis

Скажу прямо: Степан Трофимович постоянно играл между нами некоторую особую и, так сказать, гражданскую роль и любил эту роль до страсти, — так даже, что, мне кажется, без нее и прожить не мог, I will say it plainly: Stepan Trofimovich always played a certain special and, so to speak, civic role among us, and loved that role to the point of passion, so much so that, it seems to me, he could not have lived without it.

The chronicler opens with the passion for the role and not with the biography, and already the irony is at work: he swears to respect the man in the same paragraph in which he compares him to Gulliver, who, back from Lilliput, shouted to the coachmen of London to get out of the way. The voice is neither hostile nor wholly complicit, and that is what makes the portrait yield more than a straight satire.

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Chapter II: Prince Harry and the Arranged Marriage

FamilyTruth and LiesThe Individual and Society

Chapter summary

Apart from Stepan, there was another person to whom Varvara Petrovna was attached: her only son, Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin. Stepan was called to educate him when the boy was about eight, and the father, a frivolous general, had long been separated from his wife. Stepan won him over because he was himself a child: he would wake his ward, aged ten or eleven, at night to weep over his sorrows or to tell household secrets, and the two would embrace in tears. The boy knew that his mother loved him and hardly loved her back; he felt her fixed gaze on his body. The teacher, the chronicler says, touched his deepest chords and awakened the first, still vague sensation of that eternal and sacred melancholy longing which a chosen soul, once it has tasted it, never exchanges for cheap satisfactions. At sixteen the young man was sent to the lycee, thin, pale and strangely quiet; only later would he become known for his physical strength.

Once out of the lycee, he enters the Guards cavalry at his mother's wish, is received in the best salons of Petersburg, and suddenly reports of dissipation begin to circulate: people run down by trotting horses, a savage act against a lady with whom he had been involved and whom he insulted in public, his reputation as a provoker of duels. Stepan reassures his mother with the example of Harry in Shakespeare, the prince who caroused with Falstaff. Varvara Petrovna, instead of shouting "nonsense!" as she has lately been doing, listens, reads the gossip column with attention, and is not reassured. News arrives of two duels, almost back to back, one opponent killed on the spot and another crippled. He goes to trial, is demoted to private with loss of rights, and sent to an infantry regiment. In 1863 he distinguishes himself and is promoted to officer. Varvara Petrovna, who wrote about a hundred letters and humbled herself, watches him ask for discharge and vanish: he lives among drunkards, barefoot clerks and retired soldiers, in the dens of Petersburg, and seems to enjoy it. His mother persuades him to return, and Prince Harry appears in the town at twenty-five.

The chronicler sees him for the first time and is astonished: he expected a rag reeking of vodka and finds the most elegant gentleman he has ever seen. The town splits between those who adore him and those who hate him to the point of bloodshed, but everyone goes wild for him: some because they suppose a fatal secret in him, others because they like that he is a murderer. At first everyone finds him remarkably sensible. Six months later he pulls an old man from the club by the nose, kisses Liputin's wife in front of everyone, and bites the governor's ear. The town, which prefers to see him sick rather than admit that a lucid man humiliated it, accepts the diagnosis of delirium, and his mother sends him to Italy. Years later, seeing that her son is courting the daughter of the Drozdovs and then soon pulls away from her, Varvara Petrovna decides to marry her ward Darya to Stepan, both to rid herself of a suspicion and to clear his debt to her son Pyotr.

Analysis

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Analysis

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