Tikhon

Who He Is

Tikhon is the retired bishop who lives in retreat, for reasons of health, in the Spaso-Efim monastery at the edge of town, and he is the man to whom Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin brings a confession. Tall, thin, about fifty-five, in a plain cassock, with a vague smile and a gaze that seems shy, he keeps in his cell worn oak furniture and fine gifts, profane engravings, and an oratory of icons, holy fathers, and stage plays. Those who like him and those who do not keep something to themselves about him, some out of disdain, others out of a discretion that shields a weakness, perhaps holy madness. An old man at the club calls him nearly mad and drunk, which the narrator denies, since what he has is rheumatism in the legs and nervous spasms. Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina visits him almost every month. The one who sends Stavrogin to him, without saying why, is Ivan Shatov (ch. I, Part Two). The novel shows him in a single chapter, which the magazine's editor refused and which the author never saw in print, and it is in that chapter that Stavrogin speaks of himself, for the only time, to someone who answers. Tikhon neither absolves nor condemns: he gives back to him what the confession hides.

Trajectory

In ch. I, Part Two, on the night Stavrogin climbs Shatov's stairs after visiting Kirillov, Shatov sends him off with a piece of advice: visit Tikhon, a retired bishop in retreat at the town monastery. Stavrogin had never heard of that sort of person. He says he will go, and thanks him.

On the morning after the night of ch. VIII, Part Two, in "With Tikhon", Stavrogin crosses town, passes a column of workers from the Chpigulin factory, and reaches the monastery with three printed leaflets in his pocket. The conversation starts crooked. He denies having been there four years earlier, as Tikhon suggests, and denies any resemblance to his mother. He lists everything the bishop must have heard about him, says he does not know why he came, and then, without transition, says that at night he sees an evil being, ironic and rational, and that it irritates him. Then he calls all of it nonsense. He asks whether Tikhon believes in the devil and in God. Tikhon answers that devils exist and can be understood in different ways, and that he would move a mountain if God commanded it, though perhaps not, because he does not believe wholly. The complete atheist, he says, stands on the next-to-last step toward perfect faith, while the indifferent person has no faith at all, only a bad fear. He recites by heart the letter to the angel of the church in Laodicea, the one about the lukewarm. Stavrogin says it is meant for the indifferent, and says that he likes him very much. When Tikhon lightly touches his elbow, he grows angry at having said "like," and calls him a cynic and a psychologist who enters the souls of others. Tikhon replies that what touched him was learning that the Lamb prefers the cold to the merely lukewarm, and that Stavrogin does not want to be merely lukewarm. Then Stavrogin puts the leaflets on the table. It is the confession of something he did in Petersburg years before, which he intends to print in three hundred copies and send to the police, the newspapers, and his acquaintances. Tikhon reads for an hour, slowly, rereading some passages, and asks whether a few things in the style could not be corrected. He adds:

When Stavrogin asks why he shows no disgust or shame, Tikhon says that he has nothing to conceal. What appalled him was the great idle force that went off, on purpose, to waste itself in squalor. The act, he says, many people commit, and they live at peace with their conscience. Stavrogin felt its full depth, which is rare. Stavrogin asks, with irony, whether he now respects him more because of the leaflets, and Tikhon answers without lessening the gravity or making it unspeakable:

Stavrogin admits that if a stranger he will never meet forgave him in silence, it would be lighter, and that if Tikhon forgave him, it would be much lighter. Tikhon says yes, on condition that he forgive too. When Stavrogin asks for what, he answers:

Stavrogin wants the forgiveness of Tikhon and of one or two others, and the hatred of all the rest, so that he can bear it with humility. Tikhon asks whether he would not bear the general punishment with the same humility, and Stavrogin admits that perhaps he would not. Tikhon says he speaks because he is afraid for him, since ahead there is an almost impassable abyss. Stavrogin asks whether he will not bear their hatred with humility, and Tikhon, in a half-whisper, answers with two words:

Pressed to point out where the ridiculous lies, Tikhon says that even in the form of the deepest repentance there is something of it. When asked whether it is only in the form, he explains his criterion:

Stavrogin states the goal for the first time without irony: to forgive himself. Tikhon answers with a sentence that turns against him the denial of God he has just voiced:

Tikhon adds that Christ forgives, if he comes to forgive himself. Then he corrects himself, saying that he has blasphemed: even without reconciliation with himself, Christ forgives for the intention and for the suffering. When Stavrogin picks up his hat, Tikhon asks only that he reconsider. In place of publication, he proposes a greater sacrifice: keep the leaflets and the intention, renounce even the desire for martyrdom, and go secretly, as a novice for five to seven years, to an old hermit of a Christian wisdom that neither of them attains. Stavrogin interrupts him with disgust and stands up. Tikhon rises with him, hands joined and a convulsion in his face, and says what he sees:

Stavrogin shouts "Damned psychologist!" and leaves the cell without looking back.

Hours later, in ch. X, Part Two, in the governor's wife's drawing room, Stavrogin answers Liza before everyone that he is the husband of the captain Lebyadkin's sister. In the days that follow, the Lebyadkins and Liza die, and later Shatov and Kirillov. Stavrogin knew of the first deaths and did not stop the killers (ch. III, Part Three). He writes Darya a farewell letter and is found hanged in the attic at Skvoreshniki (ch. VIII, Part Three). The book does not say whether Tikhon's prediction comes true in these events. Without the chapter, Stavrogin's refusal of Pyotr's plan and his declaration of marriage in the salon have no visible cause. Read in the place where the author wanted it, the chapter supplies that cause:

Themes Embodied

Tikhon judges the form, not the deed. He accepts the whole act, says that there is no greater one, and puts the wound in the tone. The cold document, which looks like a demonstration, is a guilty man's challenge to a judge, and whoever reads it that way leaves the penance without having entered it. This is Guilt put into a professional question: whether the confession comes from the heart or from the style. The second idea he brings, that a sin never belongs only to the one who commits it, takes from Stavrogin what he asks for: to be the only guilty one, so that he can be hated by all and bear it that way.

Tikhon's words support two readings of themselves. Stavrogin reads them as psychology, in the sense of the trade of someone who enters the souls of others and names what he sees, and that is why he calls him a cynic. But Tikhon includes himself in what he says. He admits that he does not know whether there might be something in him that enjoys others' misfortune, says he judges men by himself, and asks forgiveness of the one who came to ask it of him. If the first reading holds, the conversation is a diagnosis. If the second holds, it is a scene in which someone answers Stavrogin's guilt without placing himself outside it.

Before Stavrogin, who received from Kirillov a logic, from Shatov a catechism of Russia, and from Pyotr a program, Tikhon brings God and the Divine without a formula: the letter to the lukewarm, the gradation between the atheist and the indifferent, the Lamb who prefers the cold to the lukewarm. What he offers is the opposite of what Stavrogin seeks. Instead of being seen by all, to be forgiven by one. Instead of suffering without measure, long and secret obedience. Instead of a sin that is only his, the guilt of all for all.

Divergent Readings

Joseph Frank shows that Stavrogin's confessor comes from the project Dostoevsky called The Life of a Great Sinner, never written as such, and whose holy monk is modeled on Tikhon Zadonsky. A note by the author, cited in Frank's book, says that man was not born for happiness:

The note puts suffering as the path to knowledge of life. The novel's Tikhon accepts suffering as a path, and refuses the form Stavrogin gives it, that of suffering without measure, sought as a means of forgiving himself. Against those who read Stavrogin as incapable of repentance, the text shows the opposite: it is Tikhon who says that he felt the full depth of what he did, which is rare. The novel does not decide whether Stavrogin's confession comes from the heart or from the style.

Relationships

• Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin: the visitor who hands him the confession, who refuses the secret penance, and whom Tikhon foresees committing a new crime before publication ("With Tikhon").
• Ivan Shatov: the one who sends him to Stavrogin on the night they part (ch. I, Part Two).
• Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina: the monthly visitor to the monastery, in whose son Tikhon sees traces ("With Tikhon").
• Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky: the involuntary counterpoint. Pyotr offers Stavrogin the role of hidden chief (ch. VIII, Part Two), and Tikhon offers him secret obedience and the forgiveness of one ("With Tikhon").