Darya Pavlovna Shatova

Who She Is

Darya Pavlovna Shatova, the "Dacha of the diminutives" of Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin, is the sister of Ivan Shatov and the ward of Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina, raised in her house with a governess, tutors, and music, with a capital set aside since she was twelve so that the girl's life, in the chronicler's words, would have no mistakes (ch. II, Part One). Her brother was born a serf of Varvara Petrovna and hardly sees her (ch. I, Part One). She grew up on the inside of the house, discreet, grateful, and almost always silent. She is about twenty. In the book she appears as the object of other people's decisions: arranged to marry by the woman who raised her, suspected of sins that are not hers by the man who fears the engagement, compared to a nurse by Stavrogin. Only twice does the text give her a voice of her own about what she wants. Both point to the same man.

Trajectory

In ch. II, Part One, Varvara Petrovna takes her to Switzerland, where Stavrogin is staying with the Drozdovs, and leaves her there when she returns. In August, the story Praskovya Ivanovna brings, of a quarrel in which Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina saw Stavrogin talking with Darya and flew into a rage, keeps Varvara Petrovna up all night. By morning she has a plan: to marry her ward to Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky. At the tea table she asks whether there is anything on the girl's soul, heart, or conscience that she wants to tell. She hears a gloomy, firm "nothing," and only then asks whether she wants to marry. She sets the terms: fifteen thousand rubles from the will after the wedding, of which eight thousand will pay off Stepan's debt as if it were Darya's, and an annual pension for the couple. Darya says, firmly, that it is a matter of indifference to her, if the marriage is inevitable. Varvara Petrovna dwells on the word. The girl ends up agreeing, with downcast eyes, and asks only whether he already knows.

In ch. III, Part One, Stepan, who does not see his fiancée, demands that she tell him to his face, before heaven, whether there is a secret. He ends the week on the phrase that hits her without naming her:

In ch. V, Part One, Darya enters through the side door when Varvara Petrovna sends for her, without having been warned that Marya Timofeyevna Lebyadkina is in the room. Marya is amazed that her brother, the captain Ignat Lebyadkin, calls such a charming girl a serf, and Darya looks at her fixedly. She answers Varvara Petrovna's questions calmly, without a trace of disturbance: she never saw her, she must be the captain's sick sister, to whom she handed three hundred rubles at Stavrogin's request, back in Switzerland. The chronicler notes that this girl was hard to shake for long, whatever she felt inside. Varvara Petrovna absolves her before everyone, attributes the money to a whim of her son, and takes up her defense. When Stavrogin approaches Darya and asks whether he may congratulate her, or not yet, she answers in a low voice that she knows. Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky holds her to the bet made in Switzerland that she would never marry. Later, when Stepan is expelled, she hurries ahead of him, anguished, to say that she respects and esteems him, and to ask him to think well of her too. Liza, from the moment she sees her come in, looks at her with a hatred and contempt that are not hidden.

In ch. III, Part Two, after the duel, Darya waits behind the alcove in the corridor and hears the order Stavrogin gives the servant to bar his mother. He says he wanted to break things off. She answers that she had thought of it too, because Varvara Petrovna suspects too much about the relations between the two of them. She is sure there will be an end, and that then, if he calls her, she will come. She also says that if she does not go to him, she will be a nurse to the sick or a seller of Gospels on the roads, because she cannot be anyone's wife or live in houses like that one. She adds that he knows what she wants. He answers that he has never been able to find out, and compares her to an old nurse who clings to a single patient. He tells her the scene on the bridge, in which Fedka, a little devil, proposed that he kill the Lebyadkins for fifteen hundred rubles. Then he provokes her with a question she refuses to hear: whether she would still come after Fedka's little shop. She leaves with her face hidden in her hands, without answering, after having said what she expects:

In ch. VII, Part Three, in the village where Stepan falls ill, he tells Sofya Matveyevna a story of love kept silent for twenty years, between a dark-haired woman, who is Varvara Petrovna, and a fair-haired one. The chronicler supposes the blonde is Darya, but only supposes it, and that same night Stepan himself confesses that he has lied his whole life. When Varvara Petrovna reaches the bedside, she brings Darya and two footmen and sends her to fetch Doctor Salzfisch. In ch. VIII, Part Three, when Varvara Petrovna returns to the town house and locks herself in alone, the maid hands Darya, in the morning, a letter from Stavrogin that a stranger brought the night before. Darya recognizes it before opening it. He reminds her that she wanted to be his nurse. He says he leaves in two days and will not return, that he has a little house in the canton of Uri and money, and asks her to come with him. At the same time he says that calling her is a terrible baseness. In the same passage he states why he does not kill himself:

Darya takes the letter to Varvara Petrovna, who reads it alone, calls her in again, and asks, almost timidly, whether she is going. She says yes. Varvara Petrovna orders them to get ready, and they will go together. The departure is interrupted by the servant Aleksei Yegorych, who brings the news that Stavrogin arrived before dawn, shut himself in his wing, and does not answer questions. In the attic, Darya climbs behind Varvara Petrovna, goes in, screams, and falls in a faint.

Themes Embodied

Darya is the character most talked about and least listened to. Each person who names her speaks of her out of their own need. Stepan sees her as the suspicion that turns the engagement into a humiliation. Varvara Petrovna sees the problem a marriage solves. The captain sees the target of an accusation about money. Stavrogin sees someone whose desire he says he never understood. The Family around her is an arrangement of pieces: the benefactress marries the girl off for her own good and for another's debt, the brother does not appear, and the engagement comes ready-made.

What she accepts at the door scene supports two readings, and Stavrogin himself gives the first. In the first, it is a nurse's devotion, the attachment of someone who chooses one patient among many, and the comparison is his, said with disgust. In the second, it is the lucid decision of a clever girl who knows what he is. She has heard from his own mouth that he will ruin her and call her, she says she cannot be anyone's wife or live in the house where she grew up, and she goes anyway. The following pages do not resolve it: she goes when the letter arrives, and what she finds in the attic is the end she said she expected, without any answer to what would come next.

Darya also carries, in another way, what the theme of Guilt calls other people's sins. Stepan refuses to marry "other people's sins," and the phrase fits him without the book saying whether they exist. She, in silence and in advance, accepts sharing the worst of the man who will call her. This is the opposite of what Stavrogin asks of Bishop Tikhon: to be the only guilty one, forgiven by a few and hated by all. Tikhon, in "With Tikhon", answers with the idea that no sin is isolated and that each person is guilty, in some way, of the sins of others. Darya is the one who turns this into a conduct, without saying a word about the thesis.

Relationships

• Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin: the man from whom she receives the request for three hundred rubles in Switzerland (ch. V, Part One), whom she waits for by the door (ch. III, Part Two), and from whom she receives the letter from Uri (ch. VIII, Part Three).
• Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina: the benefactress who raises her, houses her, and clears her name (ch. II, Part One, ch. V, Part One), and who in the end decides to go with her (ch. VIII, Part Three).
• Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky: the professor who discovered her first, and whose Russian literature course Varvara Petrovna interrupted at the first lesson (ch. II, Part One); the fiancé the marriage assigns her, whom she treats with respect (ch. V, Part One).
• Ivan Shatov: the brother she barely sees, whom Varvara Petrovna summons as the bride's brother (ch. III, Part One), and whose line that whoever loses the bond with the earth loses the gods Stavrogin quotes to her in the letter (ch. VIII, Part Three).
• Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina: the one who looks at her with hatred and contempt when she enters the room (ch. V, Part One).
• Ignat Lebyadkin: the one who accuses her of keeping part of the money (ch. III, Part One), and to whom she answers with the calm of someone who handed everything over (ch. V, Part One).