Liputin

Who He Is

Liputin is a stingy minor official, a liberal taken for an atheist and a gossip, punished more than once for it, whom everyone likes for his wicked wit. He is one of the three figures that Stepan Trofimovich's circle raises (ch. I, Part One). He dreams of Fourier's phalanstery and reads Considérant, but keeps the leftovers of dinner under lock and key. He is married to a pretty, timid young woman and has a maid, Agafya, who serves as messenger and, later, as spy. In the first third of the book he carries news from one house to another and enjoys, with furious pleasure, watching two people expose themselves to each other through him. In the second he is one of the five of the quintet that Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky shaped in town. In the third he ends up with a false passport, in a drunken binge, in a Petersburg brothel. The trait that defines him is wanting always to be one step ahead of whoever has more power, and discovering, when it comes to the flesh, that he was ahead of no one.

Trajectory

In ch. II, Part One, after Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin takes old Gaganov by the nose at the club, Liputin, who guesses how much the scandal pleases Nicolas, goes to invite him to his wife's birthday party. Nicolas dances with the hostess, makes her laugh, and kisses her on the mouth three times in front of everyone. Liputin walks him to the staircase with bows. The next day the maid Agafya appears at Varvara Petrovna's house with the message that her master asks after Nicolas's health following the evening before. Nicolas sends word that the master is the most intelligent man in town. The maid brings back the answer Liputin predicted:

When the town, after the bite on the governor, concludes that Nicolas was ill, Liputin, they say, was the first to guess it. At parting, Nicolas asks how he managed to predict the answer. Liputin says that he took him for an intelligent man and pretended to believe he was out of his mind. Nicolas replies that he was a little wrong, since he had indeed been ill, and asks whether Liputin really thinks one throws oneself on people in full possession of their wits, and to what end. Liputin shrinks and does not answer. Seeing a volume of Considérant on the table, Nicolas calls him a Fourierist. Liputin jumps and says the translation is for the universal language of the social republic and harmony, and Nicolas laughs: that language does not exist. Of all the faces he saw in town, it is Liputin's that Nicolas keeps:

In ch. III, Part One, the chronicler, who fears him, meets him in the street. Liputin asks nothing and pours out the town's news: the governor's wife and her new conversations, the opposition forming in the club. That night Stepan asks an absurd question, whether Liputin knows or not, and concludes that he knows everything and something more besides. Liputin enters Stepan's house with Alexei Kirillov, whom he introduces as an acquaintance of Pyotr's, and soon reveals, in front of him, that the engineer is writing a study on the causes of the rise in suicides. He adds mockingly that Kirillov rejects all morality, adopts the principle of general destruction for good ends, and asks for more than a hundred million heads to put reason in Europe. Kirillov takes offense. On the threshold, in passing, Liputin drops the first bomb: Kirillov is in a bad mood because he had a row with Captain Ignat Lebyadkin over the captain's mad sister, whom the captain whips morning and night. He tells the rest when Stepan grabs him by the shoulders and sits him down in the middle of the room. Varvara Petrovna sent for him, asked him in confidence whether Nikolai Vsevolodovich is sane or ill, and asked for the truth, promising gratitude forever. The town is already talking about money, and the source, he says, is Kirillov himself, who supposedly confirmed the sum on Nicolas's behalf. The chronicler notes that Liputin's favorite method is to get a person to talk through a third party, and that he enjoys watching the two of them expose themselves. Later, when the captain seizes the chronicler on leaving Filippov's house, Liputin catches up and tells him that Lebyadkin intends to send verses to Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina, that he is in love like a cat and is thinking of proposing, because Nicolas sold him the old estate of two hundred souls.

In ch. V, Part One, the captain arrives at the salon of Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina in tails and white linen, on Liputin's advice. Varvara Petrovna tells Praskovya Ivanovna that she too received an anonymous letter, a clownish one, which assures her of Nicolas's madness and warns her about a lame woman. She says she learned, in conversation with one of her son's most secret and despicable enemies, where the anonymous letter came from. The text does not name him, and everything points to Liputin.

In ch. II, Part Two, the captain confesses to Stavrogin, in tears, that he only spoke of the secret to Liputin, while drunk. In ch. V, Part Two, Liputin is one of those circling around Yulia Mikhailovna von Lembke, who wants him as the editor of the newspaper she dreams of founding. In ch. VII, Part Two, at the meeting in Virginsky's house, he is among the five of the quintet, with Virginsky, Shigalyov, Liamchin, and Tolkachenko. He is among those irritated by Shigalyov's system, and it is he who reminds the major that the major himself had said he did not believe in God. In ch. VIII, Part Two, Pyotr describes him to Stavrogin as a swindler whose weak spot he knows. In ch. X, Part Two, the chronicler admits that Pyotr, Liputin, and perhaps Fedka spoke earlier with some of the factory workers.

In ch. I, Part Three, at the matinee, he is one of the organizers, with a ribbon on his shoulder, and the chronicler now has firm evidence that he and Liamchin let the worst rabble in town in without tickets. When the drunken captain appears on stage and lets out a long, happy laugh, it is Liputin who leads him off, with two servants. A moment later he returns, with the finest sweetly sour smile, asking leave to read the verses of a local poet who wishes to remain anonymous. The audience shouts "Read!" The verses mock the governess who teaches French to snotty children, at the opening of a festival for the benefit of governesses. Asked backstage whether he wrote the poem with the captain, he tells the chronicler that it is none of his business. After reading, he stands still on the stage, as if he wanted to add something, frightened, in the chronicler's opinion, by his own audacity. In ch. II, Part Three, Pyotr tells Yulia that there was no conspiracy beyond Liputin, whose gesture with the imbecile's verses might seem witty. At the ball, Liputin and Liamchin lose their ribbons and are in the literary quadrille.

In ch. III, Part Three, Pyotr tells Stavrogin and Liza, in his version, that he had asked Liputin to put the Lebyadkins on the train, with two hundred and thirty rubles given from his own pocket. He says Liputin wanted to amuse himself at the matinee, took two hundred rubles from the captain when he arrived half-dead, and that Fedka took advantage. In ch. IV, Part Three, at the house of Ensign Erkel, after the fire and the dead, Liputin speaks for the quintet: what do Mr. Stavrogin's little intrigues have to do with the group? Pyotr blames him for not having dispatched Lebyadkin, and says he pinched the woman in her room, which he knows from the maid Agafya, whom Pyotr pays to spy. When Pyotr says there is a denunciation ready, Liputin shouts that it is certainly Stavrogin's. Pyotr stumbles and corrects himself: it is Shatov's. The chronicler recounts what was going on among the five:

Pyotr and Liputin go together to Kirillov's house. Liputin, who hates him for his arrogance and knows that he will go as a slave to be first in line, trots alongside. Pyotr stops at a tavern to eat a steak, and Liputin watches him eat for half an hour with a hatred that nearly makes him sick. On leaving, Pyotr hands him a proclamation to read, and says he will compose it himself and print it at Shatov's press, which will be dug up. Liputin finds the text foolish and refuses, and in the heat says that perhaps there is only their quintet and no network at all. Pyotr calls him a cowardly puppy and, after an idiot, goes on. At Kirillov's house, Liputin watches from the doorway the scene in which Fedka demands payment from Pyotr and knocks him down with his fists. Afterward, at the corner, he hears Pyotr ask whether he saw what the convict drank in the kitchen, and say that it was the last time in his life that he drank vodka. Liputin runs home. For some time he has kept a passport in another name, and since Pyotr's idiotic remark he had decided to flee at dawn. But while packing his bag he realizes that the escape can only come after Shatov, decided, signed, and sealed. At eleven in the morning he learns that Fedka was found dead, and Pyotr's prophecy about the vodka makes him stop hesitating. He kicks the bag under the bed and, at night, with the passport in his pocket, is the first to arrive at the appointed place.

In ch. VI, Part Three, in the park, he comes out of the grotto when called and answers the whistle from the lake with a clay child's whistle he bought that morning for a kopeck. He receives Shatov by the grotto and attacks him head-on, while Tolkachenko leaps from a tree and Erkel holds his elbows. After the murder, he catches up with Pyotr on the path to say that Liamchin will inform, and hears that he will not. Then he asks for an answer, but a true one: is there only one quintet in the world, or hundreds, in the highest sense?

In ch. VIII, Part Three, Liputin vanishes before noon, and the police only learn of it the next day, when they question the family, who are mute with fear. He is arrested in Petersburg two weeks later, drunk, in a brothel, although he had a passport in another name, money, and the chance to flee abroad. He sought out Stavrogin and Pyotr, suddenly gave himself over to drink and debauchery, and now lies and prepares to speak at the trial. Neither he nor Tolkachenko seems frightened, which the chronicler finds strange.

Themes Embodied

Liputin is Truth and Lies as the power of someone who knows and does not say, or says through another. He lives by handling information, from the chronicler to Varvara Petrovna and to Stepan, and the cleverness Nicolas grants him with irony is that of guessing the answer before it is given. He is also the liberal without conviction whom Revolution finds ready to use: a Fourierist and a miser, an atheist and a gossip, he enters the quintet with the same gestures he used in the salons.

The same habit, of being one step ahead of whoever holds more power, explains his changing sides without his deciding it. With Nicolas, the step ahead is to predict the answer and have it delivered through the maid. With Pyotr it is the reverse: he speaks for the five when they want an explanation, but gives in within minutes, obeys even while detesting him, and is the first to reach the appointed place. The question he asks on the road, whether the quintet is one or hundreds, appears only after the crime, when the network would have to justify it. He says he always knew it was one, and the text shows that he knew and went along with it all the same.

The text supports two readings of what moved him at the matinee, and neither is refuted. It may have been sabotage arranged with someone who does not yet appear, and Pyotr's version, which dilutes the episode and then blames him for it, does not confirm it. It may have been the daring of someone who feels that no one will stop him, and the detail that he stands still on stage after reading, frightened by his own audacity, fits this second reading. Either way, the gesture shows what he is in the book: someone who acts in directions that seem prudent to him and ends up doing something whose scope he does not grasp.

Relationships

• Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky: the head of the quintet, who calls him a cowardly puppy and an idiot, who describes him as a swindler with a known weak spot, and to whom he asks, after the crime, whether the network exists (ch. VIII, Part Two, ch. IV, Part Three, ch. VI, Part Three).
• Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin: the guest he escorts to the staircase with bows, and to whom the maid brings back the reply (ch. II, Part One); the name he shouts as the author of the denunciation, before Pyotr corrects himself (ch. IV, Part Three).
• Ignat Lebyadkin: the drunken confidant of the secret (ch. II, Part Two), whom he advises on what to wear to the salon (ch. V, Part One) and whose verses he reads at the matinee (ch. I, Part Three).
• Alexei Kirillov: the engineer he introduces to Stepan and exposes through the article on suicides (ch. III, Part One), and in whose house he accompanies Pyotr on the night of Fedka's death (ch. IV, Part Three).
• Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina: the lady who asks him for the truth about her son, and whose anonymous letter, all signs suggest, came from him (ch. III, Part One, ch. V, Part One).
• Shigalyov: the fellow member of the quintet who leaves the park while he stays behind (ch. VII, Part Two, ch. VI, Part Three).
• Fedka: the convict whose death he learns of in the morning, and which decides him to stay (ch. IV, Part Three).