Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin

Who He Is

Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin, the Nicolas of drawing-room talk, is the only son of Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina, a rich woman, and of a frivolous general who already lived apart from her, and was educated from the age of eight by Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, who won him over by being a child himself (chapter II of Part One). He passes through the Guards cavalry, two duels, a trial, and an infantry regiment, where he is demoted to private and returns to officer rank in 1863, and then travels for more than three years through Europe, Egypt, Jerusalem, and Iceland; he reappears in town at twenty-five as Shakespeare's Prince Harry, with a face the chronicler finds too perfect (chapter II of Part One). He is the largest landowner in the province (chapter IV of Part Two) and, without the town knowing it until the scene in his mother's drawing room, the husband of Marya Timofeyevna Lebyadkina, whom he married in Petersburg almost five years earlier, out of boredom and a desire to debase his own life (“With Tikhon”, chapter X of Part Two). The novel revolves around him without giving him the word: almost everything known of him comes through the mouths of others, and those who received an idea from him, Alexei Kirillov and Ivan Shatov, return to his door to collect on it (chapter I of Part Two). What he wants he says only once without irony, to Bishop Tikhon: to forgive himself, so that the vision that haunts him will cease (“With Tikhon”). What he fears is the laughter of others, which Tikhon names, and the gesture of greatness that a suicide would be, the last deception (“With Tikhon”, chapter VIII of Part Three). What he knows, and confesses to Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina, is that the Lebyadkins would be killed and that he did not stop the murderers (chapter III of Part Three). Where he errs is in taking omission for innocence: he thinks that having decided nothing leaves him outside what happens, and the book shows the lives around him organizing themselves around what he left unsaid.

Trajectory

In chapter II of Part One the chronicler presents him through what the town makes of him: the pupil whom his master woke at night to weep over grievances returns from Petersburg, after the Guards, the duels, and the regiment, as the Shakespearean Harry whom the professor invokes to soothe Varvara Petrovna. Six months later the beast shows his claws: he pulls Pavel Pavlovich Gaganov by the nose at the club, kisses the wife of Liputin three times on the mouth in front of everyone, and bites the governor's ear. Before any act, what the chronicler records is the face:

The doctors push the illness that explains everything back three days, and in a parting visit to Liputin, who had pretended to believe in the madness, Nicolas answers that he was indeed ill and asks whether he really thinks anyone throws himself on people while in perfect possession of his mind. Four years later, cautiously questioned about Gaganov's nose, he replies with a courtesy that does not answer:

Before he returns to the scene he is everyone's subject. In chapter III of Part One Varvara Petrovna asks Liputin, in confidence, whether her son seems to him sane or sick, and Kirillov, sounded out by Liputin at night, answers that something about him sometimes seemed strange to him. In chapter IV of Part One Liza tells Shatov that Stavrogin spoke to her a great deal about him, and Shatov blushes; later, unasked, it is Shatov who says the name of the man who took him out of America with a hundred rubles:

In chapter V of Part One, in Varvara Petrovna's drawing room, he enters after Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, and the chronicler notes that the mask of chapter II is no longer there, unable to say whether the face has changed or the eye of the one who sees it:

To his mother's question, whether Marya Timofeyevna is his lawful wife, he smiles, kisses her hand, and does not answer. To Marya, who asks him to kneel, he says, with the seriousness of someone persuading a child, that he is a stranger to her:

His only sentence about the lame woman reaches the room filtered twice, by Pyotr, who quotes Kirillov, and by Varvara Petrovna, who takes it for an exalted answer:

When Shatov crosses the room after five seconds of silence and strikes him in the face, Stavrogin seizes him by the shoulders, lets him go, clasps his hands behind his back, and turns white as his shirt. The chronicler, who supposes him incapable of fear and capable of killing in cold blood, measures his rage by what he did not do:

In chapter I of Part Two Pyotr seeks him out because after the slap he saw the hands behind the back, and moves on to the new tactic of offering himself as an instrument. Stavrogin tells him that he promised his mother to ask for Liza's hand within five days, asks Kirillov to be his second in a duel and, at Shatov's house, warns him that they want to kill him and declares that Marya Timofeyevna is his lawful wife, married in Petersburg with Kirillov and Pyotr as witnesses. Shatov collects from him what he received from him, first the phrase he attributes to him about Christ and the truth:

Then he gives him the diagnosis that he immediately applies to himself:

Before leaving Stavrogin asks Shatov not to abandon Marya Timofeyevna, hears from him the advice to visit Tikhon, of whom he had never heard, says he will go and, at the gate, warns softly that he will not come back. On the floating bridge in chapter II of Part Two Fedka offers himself on his own account, and Stavrogin threatens him with the police; at Captain Lebyadkin's new house he announces that within two days he will make the marriage public and that the money has run out; before Marya Timofeyevna, who wakes at his gaze upon her, he hears that the falcon she awaited would never have been ashamed of her before a society girl, and that he is an impostor:

He seizes her by the arm, calls her an idiot, and pushes her against the sofa; he flees repeating the word knife, forgets Fedka on the bridge while repeating it, throws the man to the ground, gives up on tying him, and flings his whole wallet into the mud. In the Brykov wood, in chapter III of Part Two, Gaganov fires three times; Stavrogin fires twice into the air and the third time, without delicacy, into the wood, and Gaganov, who does not want to be spared, sees in the gesture the greater offense:

On the way back Kirillov tells him what he saw in him, without hostility:

At home, Darya Pavlovna Shatova, who heard the order to turn his mother away, hears from him that he wanted to break with her and that a little devil proposed to him on the bridge, for fifteen hundred rubles, to end the marriage by killing both Lebyadkins; he warns her that he is capable of ruining her and of summoning her, and the question he puts to her, whether she would come too after Fedka's little shop, she does not answer.

The town that had detested him for four years absolves him, in chapter IV of Part Two, because of a remark by Yulia Mikhailovna, and he shuts himself in a silence that satisfies everyone; five days after the duel, Pyotr whispers to him at the club that he had no right to fight. In chapter V of Part Two the chronicler reports, only by rumor, that Liza raised her hand against his face at the door of the holy fool Semyon Yakovlevich and that he swerved, and notes that he came back pale. In chapter VI of Part Two Mavriky Nikolaevich yields his bride to him and hears from him, as the only fact, that he is married and can neither marry nor aspire to. On the way to Virginsky's house, while Pyotr describes the cement of the group, the shame of having an opinion of one's own, he laughs and gives the recipe for how to truly bind a group: induce four members to kill the fifth, and all are tied by blood; Pyotr thinks he will have to redeem these words that very night.

At the meeting in chapter VII of Part Two he answers the student that the answer about the origin of the family would be indiscreet, refuses to say whether he would denounce a political murder, and leaves with Kirillov. In chapter VIII of Part Two, in the muddy street, Pyotr asks him for fifteen hundred rubles to dispatch the captain to Petersburg and, on hearing that Shatov's death would serve to mold the groups, Stavrogin says what he will not accept:

He then asks Pyotr what he has never answered:

Pyotr offers him the role of Ivan Tsarevich, the hidden prince from whom the people would await the new truth, and Stavrogin's reaction is surprise:

Before climbing the stairs without answering, he hears the reason Pyotr gives at the moment he loses his calm:

The next morning, in the chapter that Dostoevsky wanted there and the editor Katkov refused, he crosses the town with three printed leaflets in his pocket and hands them to Tikhon (“With Tikhon”). Beforehand, he tells the bishop, in short sentences and with a frankness that undoes itself at once, that he sees at night a malignant, ironic, and rational being, and that he is thinking of seeing a doctor. The document titled From Stavrogin tells of the dissolution of Petersburg and the crime against the adolescent Matryosha, who waits for him on the threshold of the room with her fist raised before hanging herself; it was after that story that he decided to marry Marya Timofeyevna. What haunts him, he writes, is not the memory of the act but the image of her on the threshold, which returns to him in dreams with a red spider on a geranium leaf.

Tikhon reads for an hour and judges the tone, not the crime:

He says there is no greater crime, that many commit the same and live in peace, and that what terrified him was the great idle strength spent on purpose on squalor. Stavrogin then says, for the first time without irony, what he seeks:

Tikhon names the risk he has not measured:

He proposes trading publication for years of secret obedience to an old hermit and, when Stavrogin refuses with disgust and stands up, foresees the next fall:

Stavrogin leaves the cell shouting that he is a damned psychologist. In Yulia Mikhailovna's drawing room, in chapter X of Part Two, Liza asks aloud, before the audience, whether a captain who writes her indecent letters is really his relative, and he, who had not even seen her on entering, answers in full, with the date:

He leaves unhurried, with a haughty smile, and goes on to Skvoreshniki without seeing his mother. In chapter II of Part Three Pyotr tells Yulia Mikhailovna that Liza jumped from the marshal's wife's carriage into his, and in chapter III of Part Three, at six in the morning, she watches from there the glow fading and hears from him that he loves her more than yesterday and wants to leave that very day; she refuses, because the only ideal she has left is Moscow's, visits made and received, impossible for a married man, and asks whether he paid for the hope with his own life or someone else's. She also refuses to hear the confession and to be a nurse:

Pyotr, in the anteroom, swears that he did not order the Lebyadkins killed, attributes the death to Fedka and to the money the captain was showing off, and asks him for the idol's will that the quintet needs; Stavrogin asks whether he brought her in order to give him what he wanted, to make the husband kill the wife, and, hearing that Pyotr himself says it was not he, answers that it comes to the same. Liza asks him, before God, to say whether he is guilty, and he answers:

When Pyotr draws his revolver, Stavrogin merely answers that he should fire. Liza covers her face and leaves, and is killed by the crowd in front of the Lebyadkins' house. In chapter IV of Part Three the news reaches town that he left suddenly for Petersburg on the noon train, without seeing anyone, not even his mother, and Pyotr asks who could have let him leave.

In chapter VIII of Part Three he writes to Darya Pavlovna, from a station, inviting her and advising her not to go: he has bought a little house in Uri, he is ill and hopes to rid himself of hallucinations with the air there. He says the strength he tested everywhere proved unlimited and without application:

He says he looked at those who deny with envy of their hopes, that what came out of him was only negation, without magnanimity and without strength, and explains why he has not yet killed himself:

He measures Kirillov by contrast:

Varvara Petrovna decides to go with Darya to Uri, but Alexei Yegorych arrives to warn that he came back in the morning, without answering questions, and shut himself in his wing. In the garret, behind the little door, hangs the citizen of the canton of Uri:

Themes Embodied

Stavrogin is the question of the Meaning of Life posed in a man who lacks nothing: he has name, money, beauty, and a strength that, he writes to Darya, proved unlimited wherever he put it and found nowhere to apply itself (chapter VIII of Part Three). The book shows the form this lack of purpose takes in each scene: the absurd marriage to Marya Timofeyevna (“With Tikhon”), the accepted slap (chapter V of Part One), the duel in which he exposes himself and does not kill (chapter III of Part Two), the confession he wants to publish (“With Tikhon”); Kirillov calls this seeking burdens, and the link with Guilt is the one Tikhon returns to him, that sin is never only the sinner's:

What comes out of him is not a doctrine, it is a way of standing before others: he gives Shatov God and homeland in the same period in which, according to Shatov, he was poisoning Kirillov's heart, as the latter let him see in the months when the two lay ill in America (chapter I of Part Two), and the two come to collect. Pyotr receives no doctrine at all, he invents a Stavrogin by looking at him from afar (chapter VIII of Part Two). That is why the architecture of disciples that the common reading attributes to him needs correcting: there are two who heard him, Kirillov and Shatov, and one who imagined him, and what the book shows is what each does with the figure he has of him.

What he calls omission is what binds him to everyone: he warns Shatov that they want to kill him and does not prevent it, he knows of the plan against the Lebyadkins and does not stop the murderers, he accepts the slap and the public marriage and falls silent before Liza. The distinction he makes to Liza, I did not kill, I was against it, I knew, is exact and does not spare him, and it is what separates his responsibility from Pyotr's, who carries things out, without erasing it (chapter III of Part Three).

Divergent Readings

The book places around him readings that do not cancel one another. The first is the town's, which makes the diagnosis the alibi it needs (chapter II of Part One):

The second is Marya Timofeyevna's: in calling him an impostor she combines a delusion (he is not a prince, nor the usurper of any throne) and an exact diagnosis (he was ashamed of her before a society girl), and the text does not separate one from the other (chapter II of Part Two). The third is Tikhon's, who reads in the same document a true sincerity and a style that betrays it: Stavrogin takes offense and repeats the verb to deny it, and the repetition shows that the blow landed (“With Tikhon”). And there are two readings of the declaration of the marriage in the drawing room: belated honesty from someone with nothing left to lose, or the first public gesture of someone who hours earlier had shown Tikhon what he intends to publish of himself (chapter X of Part Two).

The reading that he would be the demon of the epigraph, the one who does not act and contaminates, was tested against the text and holds up in part, with a correction the novel itself imposes. What confirms it is stronger than intuition foresaw: in the Gospel that Stepan Trofimovich asks to hear on his deathbed, the man from whom the demons went out is found sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind (chapter VII of Part Three); in the letter to Darya, Stavrogin says that Kirillov was magnanimous because he was not of sound mind and that he himself can never lose his mind, and the doctors' report, after the hanging, rejects the hypothesis of madness completely (chapter VIII of Part Three). The Russian word in the letter is not the same as in the epigraph, but the echo is clear. What the Gospel describes as the state of the healed man, he has entire, without any cure: he is the exact anti-type of the possessed man, who loses the demons and gains reason, whereas he has reason entire and never had anything to lose.

What corrects it is the allegory explained inside the book. Stepan Trofimovich distributes the roles another way, and the sick man is Russia, and the pigs are those who drown:

And he includes himself in the count, naming his son and himself:

In the key the novel offers, Stavrogin is not the demon of the parable, he is one of the pigs, and the sick man is not he. The intuition gets the mechanism right, which is real and verifiable: the ideas that drown the herd came from a man who believed in none of them. The formulation that holds at both ends is that he is the carrier who does not fall ill, the one who transmits and is not affected, and this is called contagion, not possession. The question remains whether the hanging fulfills Stepan Trofimovich's prophecy, that the sick man is cured after the demons drown, or interrupts it.

Joseph Frank links the figure, by the biographical route, to the Mephistopheles that Dostoevsky said he had found in Speshnev in the 1840s:

Relationships

• Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina: the mother, whose hand he kisses without answering the most important question (chapter V of Part One), from whom he flees in declaring the marriage (chapter X of Part Two) and who tries to follow him to Uri (chapter VIII of Part Three).
• Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky: the tutor who raised him, called on to soften the scandals with Prince Harry (chapter II of Part One), and who in the allegory of the pigs places himself among them with his son, Petrusha, “and the others with him,” without naming his pupil (chapter VII of Part Three).
• Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky: he wants to make him the despotic idol and the hidden pretender, and is refused (chapter VIII of Part Two); later asks him for an idol's will for the quintet (chapter III of Part Three).
• Alexei Kirillov: the second at the duel, who tells him he seeks burdens (chapter III of Part Two), and the only one to whom Stavrogin grants greatness, even if he explains it by a lack of sound judgment (chapter VIII of Part Three).
• Ivan Shatov: the disciple who collects Christ and the people from him (chapter I of Part Two), who strikes him in his mother's drawing room (chapter V of Part One) and whom Stavrogin refuses to hand over to Pyotr (chapter VIII of Part Two).
• Marya Timofeyevna Lebyadkina: the secret wife, who treats him with tenderness from a distance and unmasks him up close (chapter V of Part One, chapter II of Part Two).
• Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina: the bride promised to his mother, who confronts him in public (chapter X of Part Two) and to whom he says what he knew (chapter III of Part Three).
• Darya Pavlovna Shatova: his mother's ward, who offers herself as a nurse (chapter III of Part Two) and to whom he writes from Uri (chapter VIII of Part Three).
• Tikhon: the bishop who reads him the confession and names his laughter (“With Tikhon”).
• Ignat Lebyadkin: the brother-in-law, to whom he announces the end of the money and the secret (chapter II of Part Two) and who is killed with his sister (chapter III of Part Three).
• Fedka: the runaway serf who offers himself on the bridge and to whom Stavrogin flings the money into the mud (chapter II of Part Two).
• Liputin: the official who guesses his answers and whose figure is the one most engraved in his memory, from his whole stay in the town (chapter II of Part One).