Summary of the part
While the First Part showed a town that condemned Stavrogin, this one shows a town that absolves him, and both times for the wrong reason. A loose remark by Yulia Mikhailovna von Lembke is enough to turn everyone's opinion; the same frivolity later laughs at a beaten woman, a humiliated bride, a violated icon, a suicidal boy. Behind it works Pyotr, who gives each person the lie they need: to his father, the abjection of having been a hanger-on; to the governor Andrei Antonovich von Lembke, a small, controllable conspiracy; to Karmazinov, a date that will let him sell his estate; to Alexei Kirillov, a will that declares itself his alone; to Ivan Shatov, an invitation that isolates him. Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina breaks with Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky in the words of his son, and Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina kneels in the mud before an icon nobody else respects and, days later, cannot bear to see her fiancé kneeling. The whole part leads up to the evening meeting, where the question left hanging is what binds a group of people who no longer take offense at anything.
Chapter IV: The City Absolves, Pyotr Surrounds the Father and the Governor
Chapter summary
The afternoon after the duel, the whole town gathers for the birthday of the marshal of the nobility's wife, and the talk about Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin turns cautiously until a retired general with a lisp, who loves saying aloud what others whisper, asks whether it is true the young man is mad and whether, as Stepan Trofimovich told him, he fought Gaganov only to offer his forehead to an enraged man. Yulia Mikhailovna von Lembke, irritated because everyone is looking at her, answers with a remark that goes around the town: the reason he fought Gaganov and not the student is plain for all to see.
From then on, the scandal, the slap, the limp and the fainting of Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina give way to a new figure of almost ideal severity, and the town that had detested him for four years now begins to like him, partly because he is the largest landowner in the province. They now say he is engaged to a daughter of Count K. When he appears, he shuts himself in a silence that satisfies everyone. Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina, triumphant, goes to visit Yulia Mikhailovna to thank her: she hears from Yulia that she had never heard of the merits of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, that the Sistine Madonna disappoints, that one must pet the young to keep them from the edge of the abyss, and that she is preparing a literary matinee with lunch and a ball for the benefit of poor governesses, at which Karmazinov will read his farewell "Merci" and Stepan may read something short. Varvara leaves fascinated by Yulia and furious with Stepan.
Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, angry at having learned of the duel only the next day, advises Varvara to make up with the old man, whom he wants to promote for his own calculated reasons, and offers to carry the message. Five days after the duel, at the club, he whispers to Stavrogin that he had no right to fight, that he has been to see Shatov, that Shatov wants to publish Marya Timofeyevna, and he grabs his shoulder; Stavrogin shakes him off with a threatening look.
Analysis
What the town applauds is not Stavrogin's clemency, it is his position. The change comes from a single sentence, spoken by Yulia Mikhailovna before everyone:
Разве возможно удивление, что Ставрогин дрался с Гагановым и не отвечал студенту? Не мог же он вызвать на поединок бывшего крепостного своего человека
, how could anyone be surprised that Stavrogin fought Gaganov and did not answer the student? He could not, after all, challenge to a duel a former serf of his own!
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Chapter V: Before the Party
Chapter summary
Yulia Mikhailovna von Lembke's party for the benefit of poor governesses is postponed several times, while around her forms a circle of young people and ladies, with Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky always at the center, the pianist Lyamshin, Liputin, whom she wants as editor of a newspaper, and even Karmazinov. The mood in town is frivolous: the cavalcade of young people invents adventures only to tell them afterward, mocks a lieutenant's wife who lost fifteen rubles at cards and was beaten by her husband, laughs at and hounds a humiliated bride on her wedding night, and slips obscene photographs into the bag of a seller of Gospels, who ends up arrested. Yulia scolds each of them and forgives everything the next day, on Pyotr's advice and because of a remark by Karmazinov, who finds the pranks characteristic and daring.
The peak is the sacrilege against the icon of the Nativity of the Virgin, at the gate of the church on the square: broken glass, stones and pearls torn off, and a live rat behind the glass. Among the onlookers, Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina arrives on horseback, kneels on the filthy sidewalk and gives her own earrings. Two days later, the same company visits the holy fool Semyon Yakovlevich, where Liza makes her fiancé, Mavriky Nikolaevich, kneel and, the moment he obeys, yanks him up off the ground, terrified; on the way, the group had stopped in the hotel room of a nineteen-year-old boy who killed himself after spending four hundred rubles entrusted to him by his family.
That same day, at Skvoreshniki, Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina finally has it out with Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky: she offers him three thousand rubles a year to live far from her, reduces twenty years of companionship to a list of accusations, and hears from him the promise that he will read at the party about the Sistine Madonna and then leave on foot, with a beggar's bag.
Analysis
Chapter VI: Pyotr Works the Town
Chapter summary
The party is set, and Andrei Antonovich von Lembke grows gloomier each day, with the cholera coming, cattle dying, the summer fires, and rumors that someone is setting them. Yulia Mikhailovna von Lembke, who dreams of uncovering a state conspiracy and saving the young by exposing it, believes that Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, tied to everything revolutionary in Russia and devoted to her, will show her the plot; so she sends him to cheer up her husband. Pyotr finds him on a bad day: a sub-lieutenant of the district has bitten the commander's shoulder, had proclamations in his pockets, and the manager of the Shpigulin factory, closed after a cholera outbreak, has just handed the police packets of the same leaflets.
Pyotr, pretending to be a friend, returns the manuscript novel that Lembke thought lost, with a frank criticism, and then asks him to spare Ivan Shatov, of whom he says there are the poem "Svetlaya Lichnost" and a note to the engineer Alexei Kirillov. He says the whole movement fits into seven people, asks for six days of calm and secrecy in front of his wife, and leaves. Lembke, left alone with the official Blum, hesitates before a search of the house of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky and ends up telling him to do as he likes, "later."
For the rest of the day Pyotr squeezes from Karmazinov the date on which Russia will collapse, demands from Kirillov the agreed-upon death, summons Shatov to the meeting of "our people," and at six in the evening reaches Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin just after Mavriky Nikolaevich has yielded to him his fiancée, Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina. The two walk to Virginsky's house.
Analysis
Reading of the part
Analysis