Summary of the part
In a day and a half, Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin is sought out, visited and pressed by everyone who owes him something or to whom he owes something. Pyotr wants him as a banner; Alexei Kirillov lives on the certainty that happiness abolishes time and that man, knowing this, becomes God; Ivan Shatov gives him back the doctrine of the people who carry God and cannot say that he believes; Captain Ignat Lebyadkin lives off the secret of the marriage; Marya Timofeyevna Lebyadkina, his secret wife, receives him as an impostor; Fedka offers to solve the problem for fifteen hundred rubles without ever saying the verb; and Gaganov demands that he actually shoot. Stavrogin goes through the visits accepting no debt and rejecting none. In the first, he announces the marriage and warns Shatov that they want to kill him; in the last, he throws the money into the mud and fires into the woods. The question the part raises is whose responsibility it is for the ideas and the acts that a man leaves in the hands of others without ever having taken them on.
Chapter I: The Night of the Visits
Chapter summary
Eight days after the Sunday of the slap, the chronicler and Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky live shut away, knowing nothing, while the town feeds on rumors that someone spread quickly and with the right details. The two conclude that it can only have been Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, who in four days met everyone, dines almost every day with Yulia Mikhailovna von Lembke and was summoned by Karmazinov. The Lebyadkins have vanished, carried off by Pyotr beyond the river, and Ivan Shatov has shut himself in at home. Stepan, after two conversations with his son that leave him in bed with a wet towel on his head, remains strangely calm.
On Monday, at seven in the evening, Pyotr finally manages to be received by Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin, who has spent the week locked in, his face swollen, with Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina prowling outside the door. He enters shouting on purpose, so that the other has time to hide a letter, looks at the end of the envelope under the paperweight and explains himself with loud frankness: he was the one who spread the rumor of Stavrogin's liaison with Shatov's wife in Paris, which "explained" Sunday; he has changed his mind about Stavrogin; and he adopts a new tactic. Stavrogin says little, and to Pyotr says he promised his mother to ask, within five days, for the hand of Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina.
After the guest leaves, Stavrogin sleeps sitting up for more than an hour; at half past nine, the servant brings a note written in pencil, to which he replies with two words, and he leaves by the garden door, with an umbrella, carrying the letter. He asks Alexei Kirillov to be his second in a duel with Gaganov, and the conversation slides from the duel to suicide; then he goes up to Shatov, to whom he warns that they want to kill him and that he is going to make the marriage with Marya Timofeyevna Lebyadkina public.
Analysis
Pyotr explains to Stavrogin why he chose to appear in the town as a harmless fool, and he does so with an apology for the chatter, which is itself part of the method:
Самое бы лучшее совсем без роли, свое собственное лицо, не так ли? Ничего нет хитрее, как собственное лицо, потому что никто не поверит
, The best thing would be to have no role at all, one's own face, would it not? Nothing is more cunning than one's own face, because no one will believe it.
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Chapter II: Fedka, the Captain and Marya Timofeyevna
Chapter summary
Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin follows the river to the floating bridge, and in the middle of it someone slips under his umbrella: it is Fedka, the runaway serf from Siberia that Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky had mentioned hours before, who presents himself with the affected deference of merchants and already knows who he is. He says he has been waiting for him on that bridge for four nights, that Pyotr promises him a passport but he does not trust him, and that he has come to offer himself on his own; he asks for three rubles "for tea." Stavrogin gives him nothing, orders him not to look for him again, and threatens to hand him over to the police. He is uneasy: the man is certain it is necessary, and perhaps, he suspects, has not come on Pyotr's orders, which would be the most interesting thing.
In the new, tiny house on the outskirts of town, Captain Ignat Lebyadkin receives him sober for eight days now, somewhere between servility and fear. He declares that he lives "like Zosima," presents the will he has written (the skeleton for the students, labeled a repentant freethinker) and the poem he composed, "If She Had Broken Her Leg." Stavrogin cuts through the comedy and lists his offenses: the drinking, the lies, the money diverted from Marya Timofeyevna Lebyadkina, the letters threatening to reveal the secret. He then declares, with the calm of a household order, that within two days he will make the marriage public "to the police and to society," and that Lebyadkin will not enter the house or receive any more money. Next he questions him: he wants to know whether he has denounced anything, and to whom. The captain, in tears, says he did it only to Liputin, while drunk, and recounts the story of the pamphlets he handed out; Stavrogin offers him a version to repeat, that Liputin lied and that the captain only wanted to frighten him with the denunciation in order to squeeze more money out of him. In the other room, Marya Timofeyevna treats him as an impostor and accuses him of carrying a knife in his pocket; he shoves her with all his strength against the sofa and runs off. On the bridge he knocks down Fedka, who talks to him about the arithmetic of the money the captain keeps in the house; without a word, Stavrogin throws him the bills, and the man crawls after them.
Analysis
Chapter III: The Duel and the Burden
Chapter summary
The next day, at two in the afternoon, in the Brikov woods, Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin and Artemy Pavlovich Gaganov fight a duel. The one who wants the duel at any price is Gaganov: for a month he has been insulting Stavrogin without shaking him, has no pretext to challenge him, and is ashamed of the true motive, hatred for the affront done to his father four years earlier. He considers his opponent a shameless coward who swallowed a slap from Ivan Shatov. That is why he wrote the rude letter that led Stavrogin to propose the meeting, and he refuses outright the apologies that Alexei Kirillov, Stavrogin's second, brings for the third time; Gaganov's second, Mavriky Nikolaevich, wants a reconciliation and falls silent when he sees Gaganov trembling in his chair. Only one new clause is added, a cruel one: if nothing is settled, the shots are repeated, up to three times.
Both sides reach the woods: Gaganov and Mavriky Nikolaevich in a light carriage drawn by a pair, driven by Gaganov himself, and Stavrogin and Kirillov on horseback, the engineer firm in the saddle, though he never rides, and carrying the heavy pistol case in his hand, because he does not trust it to the servant. Mavriky is sad and worried, Kirillov calm and exact, and Stavrogin, pale and in a white hat, looks very tired. Gaganov, a retired colonel of thirty-three, big, blond and fat, left the service out of family shame, but had wanted to quit since the manifesto of 1861 that freed the serfs, which offended him personally though he could not say why. He is a dreamer of castles and knights, zealous about the purity of his lineage, who has spent his life in silence. At the signal, Kirillov proposes one last reconciliation, as a formality; Mavriky Nikolaevich supports him, and Stavrogin repeats his apologies. Gaganov shouts that every concession only makes the insult worse.
Analysis
Reading of the part
Analysis