Ivan Shatov

Who He Is

Shatov was born a serf of Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina, the son of one of her servants, and was a pupil of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky in childhood. Expelled from university, he preferred to be a tutor to a merchant rather than write to his benefactress (Part One, Chapter I). He married in Geneva the governess whom the merchant had dismissed for free ideas, Marie, and lost her within three weeks. He returned to the town a year ago, lives alone and poor on the upper floor of Filippov's house, and seldom sees his sister, Darya Pavlovna Shatova (Part One, Chapter I, Part Three, Chapter V). He changed his ideas abroad and jumped to the opposite extreme, like those Russians whom a strong idea crushes all at once and who spend their lives under the stone (Part One, Chapter I). He went with Alexei Kirillov to America, on the emigrant ship, to experience the life of a laborer, and came back from there with a hundred rubles from Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin (Part One, Chapter IV). He is the man who explodes at Stepan Trofimovich's evening gatherings and who carries within him the society's printing press, buried in the Stavrogins' park (Part One, Chapter IV, Part Three, Chapter V). What he wants is to believe: he built a whole theology of the people and cannot take the step it presupposes, and when asked whether he believes in God he replies that he is going to believe (Part Two, Chapter I). What he fears is the shame of owing and of being seen: he knocked over a little table and left Varvara Petrovna's house in mortal shame when thanking her for the anonymous hundred rubles (Part One, Chapter I). What he knows, and keeps silent about, is what Liza wants to learn about Captain Lebyadkin and his sister, Marya Timofeyevna (Part One, Chapter IV). Where he deceives himself is in taking as his own an idea given to him by another, and in taking for a right the happiness that comes to him through protection. He believes Pyotr will flee the next day, and that a son and a wife are enough to begin again, for good, at the moment they are about to kill him (Part Three, Chapter V, Part Three, Chapter VI).

Trajectory

In Part One, Chapter I, it is he who answers Stepan Trofimovich's liberalism, and answers with the charge that the professor's generation, Belinsky included, never loved the people because they imagined a French people:

He picks up his cap to leave and comes back, because the old man always calls him back. In Part One, Chapter IV, at the house of Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina, he objects to her plan for an annual book of press facts, since choosing facts already gives a direction, and gradually becomes interested. When she mentions Stavrogin, who has spoken to her a great deal about him, he blushes, and when she asks about Captain Lebyadkin, he answers only this:

On hearing that Piotr recommended him in Switzerland to run a printing press, he changes color, leaves the room, and returns to refuse. In the evening he receives Kirillov and Shigalyov, who stay three minutes in silence and leave without saying goodbye. From the door Shigalyov says that he must render accounts, and Shatov answers that he spits on accounts and owes nothing to any devil. He calls the two of them greenhorns, speaks willingly of Russian atheism as the lackeyism of thought, recounts the trip to America and, without being asked, gives the name of the one who sent him the money for the return:

He takes the chronicler to see Marya Timofeyevna in secret, and she receives him with a "Shatushka," combs him with a comb she takes from her pocket, and tells him it is funny that he is so serious. He asks whether there was a child, and she answers that what makes her cry most is having given birth without knowing her husband. When she says that if he asked nicely she might tell him more, he answers that each has his secret, and climbs the stairs hearing the captain, drunk, shout at the gate that Shatov is a serf and his sister Darya a slave and a thief.

In Part One, Chapter V, in Varvara Petrovna's drawing room, he confirms that Marya Timofeyevna lives in his house, red-faced, and stays silent in the corner, forgotten. After five seconds in front of Stavrogin, he crosses the room at a slow pace and strikes him in the face with his fist:

He leaves with his shoulders raised and his head down, muttering to himself.

In Part Two, Chapter I, Stavrogin looks for him upstairs, and he waits for him feverish, with the revolver bought from Liamshin after a night in which he saw the other come to kill him. He hears that Marya Timofeyevna is the lawful wife, married in Petersburg, and answers that he struck him for the fall, for the lie, and for everything Stavrogin stood for. He demands from his old teacher a sentence attributed to him:

He recites the ten lines of the conclusion, as one reads, his finger in the air:

And he denies that he reduces God to an attribute of the nation:

Asked, in plain words, whether he believes in God, the catechism's chain of creeds does not name God a single time:

At the end, he is the one who diagnoses Stavrogin:

Before leaving he points to Tikhon, whom Stavrogin will visit hours later. In Part Two, Chapter VI, Pyotr summons him to the meeting, to hand over the printing press and the papers, and accuses him of having asked to leave without reason. Shatov, enraged, asks whether Stavrogin will be there, laughs with contempt, and sends him away. In Part Two, Chapter VII, he sits in a corner with his cap in his hand, to show that he has come to deal with a matter, and when Pyotr asks the question about denouncing a political murder, he rises, pale and furious, and leaves in silence. Pyotr shouts after him that this is not advantageous, and he answers from the door:

In Part Two, Chapter VIII, Stavrogin refuses to hand him over to Pyotr. In Part Three, Chapter II, he listens in silence, gloomier than ever, to the news of Liza's flight that the chronicler brings him, and shouts from the stairs that he should look for Liputin, where he will learn everything. The chronicler returns to ask whether he would not visit Marya Timofeyevna, and Shatov insults him, but that night he goes to see her and finds her well, with the captain dead drunk on a sofa. On the afternoon after the fire, crushed by Liza's catastrophe and Marya's death, he wants to go and declare everything, but has no proof, only a conviction that is valid for him, and would denounce only himself (Part Three, Chapter V).

In Part Three, Chapter V, at eight in the evening, the voice he recognizes knocks at the gate, the woman's, and he receives her with a joy he cannot contain. She says she has not come to repent, that she came to him because she always took him for no scoundrel, perhaps much better than the others, and he, overcome with joy, runs to Kirillov for tea. Erkel brings him the message that he is expelled from the society for good, that he must hand the printing press over to Liputin, and that he will be fetched at six. He, in fury, looks with pity at the little boy dragged along like a lamb, and promises to go. He spends hours watching the woman, who accuses him of preaching a God in whom he does not believe. When she goes into labor, he runs to Kirillov, to the Virginskys, and to Liamshin, to whom he offers back the revolver for fifteen rubles. At dawn, after hearing a weak, cracked cry, he goes in and tells Arina Prokhorovna, who thinks it all a development of the organism:

Marie kisses his forehead and says that Nikolai Stavrogin is a scoundrel. He asks what they will call the boy, and she despairs: Ivan, Ivan, did he think she could give another name, a terrible name? The day passes in feverish talk about starting again, for good, and at night, when Erkel takes him to the Stavrogins' park, he asks the young man whether he has ever been happy, and hears that he, on the contrary, seems very happy now.

In Part Three, Chapter VI, he reaches the appointed place without suspecting the whistles, does not greet Liputin, and asks where the shovel and a second lantern are. He stamps his foot ten paces from the corner of the grotto, and Tolkachenko leaps out from behind a tree, Erkel holds his elbows, and Liputin attacks from the front. They throw him down, Pyotr comes close with the revolver, and it is said that Shatov still manages to turn his head and recognize him. In Part Three, Chapter VIII, the body is found in the lake at the end of the day, and at the scene of the crime, the forgotten cap. Marie, a day from giving birth, runs through the street with the boy, shouting that they have killed her husband, and dies three days later, the boy before her.

Themes Embodied

Shatov is the faith that cannot believe, and for that reason one of the names of God and the Divine in the novel: he gives God a body, the people, and supports it with a thesis that belongs to Stavrogin before it belongs to him, and that Stavrogin himself no longer follows (Part Two, Chapter I). His idea appears under the prism of Individual and Society, and his death under that of ideas paid for with another's life: the leaflets, the poem "Luminous Figure," which Pyotr attributes to him before Lembke (Part Two, Chapter VI), and the buried printing press are the papers around which Pyotr surrounds him.

What the book shows of him in his final days is a man who, for the first time, has something to be thankful for: the wife who returns, the son who is born, and the conviction of starting again, for good. It is the hour when theology gives way to concrete fact, and he gives it, in plain words, to someone who does not understand it (Part Three, Chapter V). That is why his death weighs more than that of a minor character: it happens on the day he was beginning to have what his doctrine only promised. And the reason they kill him, a denunciation Pyotr never saw, is proof that his certainty needs no proof (Part Three, Chapter IV).

Divergent Readings

The book sets out at the first chapter the divergence that runs through the character. Shatov defends a conviction that suffocates him and that he still does not know how to sustain, or demands from his old master what the master never gave him. The text sustains both readings, and that is why he takes his cap and comes back (Part One, Chapter I). The same duplicity marks the diagnosis he makes of Stavrogin, an atheist because he is a gentleman, when he then includes himself in the guilt: the diagnosis serves him to accuse the master and to accuse himself, and the way out he proposes, conquering God through labor, is one he himself did not fulfill (Part Two, Chapter I).

There is also the divergence over the meaning of the thesis. Shatov denies that he reduces God to the attribute of a nation, and affirms that he raises the people to God, but the formula he uses swaps subject and predicate: instead of a God who creates a people, a people that takes itself to be the sole bearer of truth and produces its own God. Perhaps he needs the people to be God because alone he cannot believe in God. Whoever wants to defend him hears his distinction between the people that believes and the people that has stopped believing, ethnographic material; whoever wants to accuse him hears the tautology (Part Two, Chapter I).

And there is the divergence over the end. For Pyotr, no happiness overcomes the conviction to denounce, and it is on this that he bases the execution. For the chronicler, the denunciation was Pyotr's invention, since he thought Shatov would not bear the death of Liza and Marya Timofeyevna and hated him personally, over an old quarrel (Part Three, Chapter IV, Part Three, Chapter VI). The book does not decide whether Shatov would have gone to denounce. It shows that on the afternoon before he wanted to declare everything and had no proof, and that on the night of his death he had something else in his head, his wife and son (Part Three, Chapter V).

Relationships

• Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin: the master from whom he received God and country, whom he strikes in Varvara Petrovna's drawing room (Part One, Chapter V), who returns the reckoning with a warning that they want to kill him (Part Two, Chapter I), and whom he refuses to hand over to Pyotr (Part Two, Chapter VIII).
• Alexei Kirillov: the cabin companion in America (Part One, Chapter IV), who gives him tea and speaks to him of seconds of harmony when his wife returns (Part Three, Chapter V).
• Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky: who summons him and who orders him killed (Part Two, Chapter VI, Part Three, Chapter VI).
• Marya Timofeyevna Lebyadkina: the neighbor who calls him Shatushka and combs his hair (Part One, Chapter IV), and whose death crushes him (Part Three, Chapter V).
• Darya Pavlovna Shatova: the sister, raised in Varvara Petrovna's house (Part One, Chapter I).
• Ignat Lebyadkin: the captain he has already dragged by the hair, and who calls him a slave (Part One, Chapter IV).
• Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina: the woman to whom he refuses the annual book, and to whom he says the captain is a drunk and a scoundrel (Part One, Chapter IV).
• Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky: the professor he accuses of never having loved the people, and who asks after him on his deathbed (Part One, Chapter I, Part Three, Chapter VII).
• Liputin: who attacks him head-on at the moment of death (Part Three, Chapter VI).
• Shigalyov: who sits silently in his house, and to whom he says he owes no accounts (Part One, Chapter IV).