Alexei Kirillov

Who He Is

Alexei Nilych Kirillov is the engineer of about twenty-seven, thin, dark, with dull black eyes, who speaks haltingly and shuffles the order of his words, newly arrived in the town (chapter III of Part One). He lives in a lodge in the yard of Filippov's house, after wrenching from Captain Lebyadkin's hands the nagaika with which the latter was whipping his sister, and he lives on tea, which he drinks at night while pacing the room until dawn (chapter III of Part One). He was in America with Ivan Shatov, the two of them lying for four months in a hut, sick, one thinking of one thing and the other of another (chapter IV of Part One). He is one of those who received an idea from Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin, and he carried it further than its owner: if God does not exist, man is God, and the proof is to kill oneself without despair and without motive, only to show that one does not depend on the fear of death (chapter III of Part One, chapter VI of Part Three). He is the novel's metaphysical nihilism, and he is also the man who plays on the floor with a baby and a red rubber ball, who serves tea and veal to his neighbor Shatov and who says he loves life (chapter I of Part Two, chapter V of Part Three). What he wants is to conquer pain and fear, and thereby to become a god; what he fears is what he himself says has tormented him all his life, God (chapter III of Part One). He knows, or claims to know, of a few seconds of harmony in which time stops and everything is good (chapter I of Part Two, chapter V of Part Three). Where he errs is in taking for pure will what is tied to other things: to the agreement with Pyotr, which he denies and fulfills (chapter VI of Part Two), to a wound before the Christ who died in falsehood (chapter VI of Part Three), and to the body, which at the moment of shooting laughs, hides, and bites (chapter VI of Part Three).

Trajectory

He first appears in chapter III of Part One, brought by Liputin to Stepan Trofimovich's house. When Liputin reveals, laughing, that he is writing about the causes of the increase in suicides in Russia, he takes offense at having been cited and used, denies that it is an article, and says he despises talking. Stepan Trofimovich, taking his leave, observes that he wants to build the town's bridge and at the same time defends universal destruction, and that they will not let him build; Kirillov repeats the phrase, astonished, and lets out a clear, child-faced laugh. That night he receives the chronicler at home, who finds him with the lamp lit by the old woman before the icon, and he explains what he is looking for: why people do not dare to kill themselves. Two prejudices hold them back, pain and the other world, and the image he gives is that of a stone the size of a house hanging over someone: it does not hurt, but everyone fears that it will. Hence the definition:

He also says he cannot think of anything else and that God has tormented him all his life, and he accompanies the chronicler to the gate with a lantern. In chapter IV of Part One he appears at Shatov's, silent, with Shigalyov, and leaves without saying goodbye before Shatov tells the chronicler what the two of them went through in America; in chapter V of Part One he is only a name, in the mouth of Pyotr, who says he arrived at his house with Stavrogin, and in that of Stavrogin, who replies to a remark of his about Marya Timofeyevna.

In chapter I of Part Two Stavrogin seeks him out to ask him to be his second in a duel with Gaganov, and finds him on the floor with the baby and the ball. The duel is treated as bookkeeping, and the conversation turns to life and death: death, strictly speaking, does not exist, because there are minutes when time stops. Stavrogin asks whether he has come to believe in a life after death, and he answers:

The proof he gives is a tree leaf, yellowed and rotting at the edges, carried by the wind, and the memory of the green leaf that at ten years old he imagined with his eyes closed in winter. Hence the thesis, which is not an allegory:

And from it comes the teaching that is possible:

Stavrogin replies that the one who taught it was crucified, and Kirillov returns a name, which corrects the word order of the God-man of tradition:

He denies having faith, despite the lamp, which he lights because the old woman likes it, and says he prays to everything, even to the spider climbing the wall. It is not a system: he says the certainty came on a Wednesday night, as he paced the room without remembering why, and the clock stopped at two thirty-seven. In chapter III of Part Two, on the way back from the duel in which he was Stavrogin's second, he is the one who tells him what he saw, without hostility, after Stavrogin fired into the air:

And he adds that whoever spares himself the price of an act does not gain the act:

In chapter VI of Part Two, Pyotr arrives at Filippov's house while he is doing gymnastics in the middle of the room and reminds him of the agreement. Kirillov answers that there is no agreement, and never was:

He agrees to leave a letter taking responsibility for the proclamations, so that no one will be sought for a year, and says that Fedka sleeps there, that he read him the Apocalypse at night over tea, and that, if Pyotr wants to have his throat cut, he will cut it. As he lets Pyotr out, he murmurs that he will give nothing against Stavrogin. In chapter VII of Part Two he is at the meeting at Virginsky's house, silent, staring at each speaker, and it is he who closes the discussion with Stavrogin in the anteroom: Stavrogin will go to his house because it is necessary to him, and there he will show him. In chapter VIII of Part Two it is he who brings Fedka to the door, in the middle of the quarrel between Pyotr and Stavrogin.

In chapter IV of Part Three Pyotr and Liputin find him drinking tea on the leather sofa; he says he wants to be alone the next day and, when Pyotr tries to get him not to think too much, calls him a base man and threatens to postpone another half year. Pyotr backs off with the phrase that binds him:

Fedka is in the kitchen, where Kirillov fried him meat and potatoes, and when the serf knocks Pyotr down with his fists it is Kirillov who revives him with a bucket of water. In chapter V of Part Three, when Shatov runs to him looking for tea for the wife who has just returned, Kirillov gives him tea, sugar, bread, veal, and a ruble, says it is good that he loves his wife after Switzerland and, at the hour of the birth, tells him of seconds that come five or six at a time:

He says that humanity should stop begetting children, immediately asks about the woman who is about to give birth, and, when Shatov answers that this is how epilepsy begins, replies softly that there will not be time. After the birth he sends an old woman to congratulate them, with hot tea, cutlets, and broth.

In chapter VI of Part Three, at one in the morning, Pyotr finds him pale, waiting for him. Kirillov agrees to write, refuses to put Shatov's name, and, on learning that Shatov is dead, cries out that it was Pyotr who killed him; the two point their revolvers at each other, Kirillov laughs in anger and lowers his arm. Pyotr leads him to the usual conversation, and he reduces the idea to a rule:

He explains why it must be him in particular:

Pyotr suggests that, to show self-will, he could kill someone else, and he refuses:

He points to the image of the Savior before the lamp and tells of the day of the three crosses, the wound that led him to conclude that the planet is a lie:

He grows excited, cries out for Pyotr to dictate and he will sign, and Pyotr dictates a text that makes him take responsibility for Shatov's death, the denunciation of the leaflets, and Fedka's hiding place; he is puzzled that it is only that, and when signing he writes Liberté, égalité, fraternité ou la mort and declares himself a citizen of the civilized world, roaring with laughter. He runs to the next room and shuts the door. Pyotr, after ten minutes without a shot, finds him standing in the corner between the wall and the cupboard, arms pressed to his body, the back of his head against the wall, as if wanting to efface himself; when Pyotr grabs his shoulder, Kirillov knocks the candle down with a butt of his head and bites his finger:

Pyotr returns only on hearing the shot: the corpse by the window, the bullet in the right temple, the revolver in the fallen hand, the paper in plain view. In chapter VIII of Part Three Marie goes to Kirillov's annex looking for her husband, sees what she sees, does not read the note, and runs into the street with the boy, and the news of the suicide and the note reaches the town within two hours. In the farewell letter to Darya Pavlovna, Stavrogin defines him by what he himself is not:

Themes Embodied

Kirillov is the question of God and the Divine taken to the point where the one who asks it must answer with his body, and for that reason he is also the question of the Meaning of Life: if there is no God, each person's life depends on whoever lives it, and the proof of power over it is to dispose of it. The novel gives the idea three images that answer one another: the yellowed leaf that proves that everything is good (chapter I of Part Two), the five or six seconds of eternal harmony that the body cannot bear (chapter V of Part Three), and the three crosses, in which the laws of nature made Christ live and die amid falsehood (chapter VI of Part Three). The first two are joy, the third is a wound, and the death scene places the three side by side. His symbols are the leaf and the five seconds, the icon and the lamp, and the spider, and the note he leaves to sign carries the weight of the leaflets.

What separates him from Stavrogin, from whom the idea came, is that he takes it seriously: in the two moments when the book asks him to obey the reasoning, in the agreement with Pyotr (chapter VI of Part Two) and on the night of the suicide (chapter VI of Part Three), he insists that the decision is his alone, that there was no agreement and that he has bound himself to nothing. The insistence shows the point where the idea tightens, because the act he wants free is the only one Pyotr counts on with certainty that he will carry out. And this is why the scene in which the doctrine is put to the test shows more than the doctrine: the man who says that the highest point of will is to kill himself laughs, curses in French, hides in a corner, and bites before firing.

Divergent Readings

The common reading of the character takes him as an example of cold, pedagogical, purely rational suicide. It has support in the text, in the doctrine, which is complete and delivered with method until the last moment:

Albert Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus, cites Kirillov in the chapter An Absurd Reasoning, in the section Absurdity and Suicide, as the rare case of someone who carries the logic of denied meaning to the end, instead of going on living; it is a claim about the doctrine, and the question it provokes is whether the act is born of despair or of conviction.

The reading that follows the scene, and not only the doctrine, sees something else. The final act is frenzied, and the novel films it that way on purpose:

Stavrogin himself, in the letter to Darya, says that Kirillov was magnanimous because he was not of sound mind (chapter VIII of Part Three), and the novel closes the pair in inverse fashion: Kirillov dies proclaiming doctrine and the scene shows frenzy; Stavrogin dies proclaiming nothing and the scene shows cold premeditation (chapter VIII of Part Three).

The two readings fit the same character, and the divergence is between the argument and the execution. Camus speaks of the argument and is right: Kirillov's syllogism is cold and closes without a crack. Whoever cites him must choose what to cite, the doctrine, which is cold, or the death, which is not. The extension of the doctrine's coldness to the scene of the act is the one the novel does not authorize, and what leaves the question open is the question the text asks without answering: if the body betrays the doctrine at the moment of proving it, what does the novelist want the reader to conclude about the idea (chapter VI of Part Three).

On the question of what one expects from the accumulation of experiences, he stands at the opposite pole from Emma Bovary: he accumulates nothing, he stakes the whole of meaning on a single act.

Relationships

• Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin: from whom the idea came, according to Shatov (chapter I of Part Two); the only one to whom he grants greatness, even if he explains it by a lack of sound judgment (chapter VIII of Part Three), and to whom he says what he saw in him (chapter III of Part Two).
• Ivan Shatov: the companion in the hut in America (chapter IV of Part One), to whom he gives tea, bread, and rubles when his wife returns (chapter V of Part Three) and whose death he attributes to Pyotr (chapter VI of Part Three).
• Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky: the one who counts on the agreed death (chapter VI of Part Two), whom he calls a base man (chapter IV of Part Three) and a monkey (chapter VI of Part Three).
• Fedka: the guest in the kitchen, whom he feeds and to whom he reads the Apocalypse (chapter VI of Part Two, chapter IV of Part Three).
• Ignat Lebyadkin: the neighbor from whom he wrested the nagaika (chapter III of Part One).
• Liputin: the one who introduces him and exposes him to the room, and who goes to his house with Pyotr on the eve of the crime (chapter III of Part One, chapter IV of Part Three).
• Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky: the one who sees him, at their first meeting, building the bridge and defending universal destruction (chapter III of Part One).