Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina

Who She Is

Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina is the widow of a lieutenant general, very rich, owner of the Skvoreshniki estate and of a house in town, mother of Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin and patroness of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, whom she has supported for more than twenty years (chapter I of Part One). She wants to be a woman of great distinction: that is why Stepan's humor frightens her, and why his costume, black frock coat, soft hat, white cravat, and silver-topped cane, came out of the drawing she had kept since the boarding school of the poet Kukolnik (chapter I of Part One). She also raised her ward Darya Pavlovna Shatova, about whom she decided, from the age of twelve, that there would be no mistakes in this life (chapter II of Part One), and she was a boarding-school friend and rival of Praskovya Ivanovna Drozdova, mother of Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina, with whom the two houses broke off without her knowing the reason (chapter V of Part One). In recent years she has become thrifty and calculating, has restored the estate, and gives alms with the town in view (chapter II of Part One, chapter IV of Part One). What she wants is for her inventions to stay standing: Stepan, Darya, her son's marriage to Liza, her house as the finest in town (chapter I of Part One, chapter V of Part Two). What she fears is her son's sanity, which she dares to ask about only, in confidence, of Liputin (chapter III of Part One). What she knows how to do is to keep: Stepan's letters in a little box, offenses for years, the phrase she will never forget (chapter I of Part One). Where she errs is in confusing deciding for others with loving others: she tells Darya that everything depends on her will after having settled the husband, the dowry, and the day (chapter II of Part One), and tells Stepan that their friendship was only a mutual outpouring (chapter V of Part Two), and she discovers, at his deathbed, that twenty years have passed (chapter VII of Part Three).

Trajectory

In chapter I of Part One the chronicler describes the mechanics of their friendship: she reads Stepan's letters, keeps them in a little box, leaves him a whole day without an answer and then receives him as if nothing had happened, training him not to remember the day before. It is the first time the text names what she does to him:

The phrase she says twice in her life, whispered, pale, after Stepan shouts hurrah before a baron from Petersburg and after he looks at her with a capricious expression on the arbor nights, is that she will never forget. When the Petersburg season, with its disdainful literati, ends with five of them demanding her journal and that she return to Skvoreshniki taking Stepan, who has aged, she sends him to Berlin to rest, because she feels they need to separate for a while. She sends a hundred anonymous rubles to Ivan Shatov, who discovers the source and goes to thank her.

In chapter II of Part One she accompanies her protégé through the scandals, writes about a hundred letters, humbles herself, and is not reassured by the Shakespearean Harry that Stepan invokes. When Nicolas bites the governor's ear and is arrested, she rushes to the governor and is turned away at the door. On her return from Switzerland, where she undid an intrigue against Nicolas and Liza's courtship, she tells everything to Stepan and, on hearing from the Drozdovs, at the end of August, that Nicolas has left and that something happened between him and Liza, she thinks all night and arrives in the morning at a project: to marry Darya to Stepan. At the tea table, she asks the girl whether there is something in her soul she wants to tell and hears that there is not; she proposes the husband, and what she gives her is a duty:

And a freedom that she herself belies:

She fixes Stepan's debt of eight thousand rubles, Darya's dowry, and the couple's pension, and sets out on foot, over wet pavements, for his house, where she tells him that only girls get married and that he is marrying on his own account.

In chapter III of Part One she refuses to receive him and promises to return his letters unopened, and the notes she sends him are about Karmazinov, whom she wants to have visit her; she summons Liputin and asks him in confidence whether her son seems to him sane or sick. She sets Sunday, at noon, for the definitive answer. In chapter IV of Part One, in the cathedral, in black, she prays with an earnestness almost in tears; in the churchyard, a poor woman, lame, with a paper rose in her hair, kneels before her, and the chronicler judges that she stopped in the very doorway with a certain pleasure, so that the governor's wife Yulia Mikhailovna von Lembke might see that what she thinks is a matter of indifference to her. She covers the woman with her shawl and puts her in the carriage, and before the lame woman, who runs cheerfully to the carriage door, she exclaims:

In chapter V of Part One she flies into the drawing room, orders the woman to sit down, and interrogates Shatov, Darya, and Captain Lebyadkin; she defends herself against Praskovya Ivanovna with an excess of calm, tells her that she too received an anonymous letter, and takes leave of Liza, her voice almost in tears, promising not to stop loving her, whatever fate has in store for her; Liza stays with her a few days. When her son arrives, the question she cuts out in firm words is the one she had never asked:

He kisses her hand and does not answer. She listens to Pyotr tell the Petersburg anecdote, which does honor only to Nikolai Vsevolodovich:

She adopts the version that exalts her, the chivalrous son, the Hamlet, and says she will adopt the unfortunate woman, that it is a duty. When Pyotr reads Stepan's letter, she, yellow, her lips trembling, listens with a malignant pleasure that for the first time in twenty years she opens her eyes, and orders her friend to leave the house and never set foot in it again.

In chapter I of Part Two she prowls outside the door of her son's study, locked for a week. In chapter III of Part Two, while Stavrogin fights a duel, she goes for a drive alone in her carriage, glad that he has ridden a horse for the first time since his illness; he has her turned away on his return. In chapter IV of Part Two, triumphant because the town absolves him, she visits Yulia Mikhailovna to thank her, and leaves fascinated by her and furious with Stepan. In chapter V of Part Two she prepares at Skvoreshniki a party of her own, for after Yulia's, in order to show which house entertains better, and summons Stepan, pencil and paper in hand: three thousand rubles a year, wherever he likes so long as it is less with her. She hears from him, shouting, that her words are borrowed:

She replies that she is not a parrot and opens the list of grievances, the books denied, the jealousy of her development, the Dresden Madonna despised. When he says Alea jacta est, she answers that she does not understand Latin, that he will go nowhere and that he will end up in her arms, with his pension, receiving on Tuesdays the worthless friends.

In chapter X of Part Two, in Yulia's drawing room, when Stavrogin answers Liza's question by saying that he is the husband of the captain's sister, she rises like a madwoman, with her hand out in front of her, as if to defend herself, and that night shuts herself up in the town house. For Yulia's matinée, in chapter I of Part Three, she had paid three hundred rubles for a ticket and sent flowers from the hothouse. In chapter IV of Part Three the news reaches town that her son has left without seeing her.

In chapter VII of Part Three she goes after Stepan on the hot trail, with Darya and two footmen. She enters shouting, expels Sofya Matveyevna, asks with furious irony how the walk went and, only on seeing him faint, understands the illness; she sends for the doctor and brings back the woman she had expelled, saying that she did not eat her. She hears from Stepan that he loved her all his life and answers in the whisper of twenty years of grievances, the perfume, the cravat, the cigar, the moon, and calls him empty, glorious, cowardly, eternally empty, before restraining herself: twenty years have passed, I was a fool too. When the doctor reminds her that she has a son, she cuts him off: I have no son. In chapter VIII of Part Three, back home, it is in the town house that the news crashes down on her and she shuts herself in; Darya brings her Stavrogin's letter, which she reads alone, and she asks, almost shyly, whether Darya will go, and says that she too will register in Uri and live in the gorge. Before the noon train, Alexei Yegorych arrives from Skvoreshniki to warn that the master came back in the morning and shut himself up in his wing; she stares at him without asking, orders the horses harnessed and, on the way, they say, crosses herself many times. In the wing all the doors are open, and when someone points to the door of the garret, she says, very pale, looking at the servants who watch her in silence, that she is not going there and why would he go up there. She climbs, and Darya behind her.

Themes Embodied

Varvara Petrovna is the Family of the novel in the register of power: everything that happens at home passes through her before it happens, and it is with her that the filiation between the idealistic liberal and the nihilists is proved in practice. Stepan stands because she invented him, Darya marries because she has already decided, Nicolas is explained by illness because the town needs the illness, and she forgives it, and the money she gives to all is the currency of control. The town treats her as an ally or a rival according to which way Yulia Mikhailovna's opinion blows, and it is in the drawing rooms of the two that the question of Individual and Society is decided: the visit she pays the governor's wife to thank her (chapter IV of Part Two) and the passage she yields her at the cathedral door (chapter IV of Part One) show who carries the town to which side.

The mechanics of control she uses on Stepan and on Darya, in which the decision is announced as a choice and the price is fixed in advance, anticipates on a domestic scale the principle of compartmentalization that Pyotr's group applies to the town's network. The difference is that she believes in the invention she makes, and Pyotr believes in none.

Divergent Readings

The text leaves two readings standing of what she feels for Stepan. In his letters, she holds on to him out of vanity or out of envy of his talent; beneath the frequent hatred, the chronicler sees an unbearable love, and that is why she demands servitude in return (chapter I of Part One). And the same woman who calls him empty on his deathbed is the one who sends for the doctor and calls back the nurse she expelled, without the text separating love from command in her: she shouts because she fears (chapter VII of Part Three). Two readings fit her shock at Marya Timofeyevna's limp, a crack in the benefactress's mask: the confirmation of what she had already heard or feared, or the realization that the stranger who kissed her hand is not just any destitute woman (chapter IV of Part One).

There are also two readings of what she does with Darya. Saying that everything depends on the girl's will, after settling everything, is her way of testing a suspicion she denies, or it is simple benefactress's zeal arranging everyone's life at once (chapter II of Part One). The chronicler gives to understand that she herself was not clear about what she was doing; the novel does not resolve it, and Darya, to whom she said that everything depended on her will, is the one who sets out with her after the son (chapter VIII of Part Three). And there are two readings of what remains: Varvara Petrovna's outcome is that of the mother who loses her son, or that of the woman who, after twenty years, discovers that her inventions are also going away.

Relationships

• Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin: the only son, to whom she puts the question she had never asked and which leaves her without an answer (chapter V of Part One), who confronts her with the declaration of the marriage (chapter X of Part Two) and whom she follows up to the garret (chapter VIII of Part Three).
• Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky: the friend she invented, tried to marry off by force (chapter II of Part One), expelled (chapter V of Part One), pensioned (chapter V of Part Two), and buried (chapter VII of Part Three).
• Darya Pavlovna Shatova: the ward she decides to marry off (chapter II of Part One) and with whom she prepares to leave for Uri (chapter VIII of Part Three).
• Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina: the bride she wanted for her son and whom she takes home with the lame woman (chapter IV of Part One).
• Marya Timofeyevna Lebyadkina: the woman who kneels in the churchyard and makes the crack in her mask (chapter IV of Part One).
• Ivan Shatov: the former serf to whom she sent a hundred rubles (chapter I of Part One) and who strikes Nicolas in her drawing room (chapter V of Part One).
• Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky: the one who flatters her with the version of the anecdote (chapter V of Part One).
• Yulia Mikhailovna von Lembke: the governor's wife, who yields her the way with irony (chapter IV of Part One) and from whom she leaves fascinated (chapter IV of Part Two).
• Liputin: the acquaintance she asks, in confidence, whether her son is sane (chapter III of Part One).
• Karmazinov: the writer she expects to receive at home (chapter III of Part One).
• Ignat Lebyadkin: the captain she seats on a chair by the door and examines without mercy (chapter V of Part One).