Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky is the conspirator of the novel, son of Stepan Trofimovich, and the only one of the principal characters who believes in no doctrine and makes use of all of them. He is also the only one who escapes: he leaves by train for Petersburg and, three months later, there are those who call him a genius.
He reaches town at twenty-seven, with a long head and a sharp eye, and talks without pause, with the clarity of loose accounts. His method is to give each person the lie they need: to his father, the abjection of having been a hanger-on; to the governor, a small, controllable conspiracy of "three men and a half"; to the quintet, faith in an international network that no one has seen; to Stavrogin, the figure of a chief who hides. When Stavrogin, in front of his mother, describes him as a universal conciliator who cannot lie, because the truth is dearer to him than success, except in the cases where success is dearer than the truth.
Pyotr tells Stavrogin, in a moment of candor, that he invented him abroad, looking at him; and he explains that what holds a group together is the shame of having an opinion of one's own. To bind the quintet, he invents a denunciation supposedly by Shatov, one he has never seen, but of which he is as certain "as of two and two," and he leads the five to kill him in the park.
After the crime, he promises the five that from then on they will be the only ones, since they were destined in advance for power: the clever ones will be added to the group, and the fools will be ridden.