Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky is the idealistic liberal of the 1840s who opens the book, and whose genealogy the book traces: supported for twenty years by Varvara Petrovna, he educated Stavrogin and is the father of Pyotr, and he dies saying that he has lied his whole life.
The chronicler introduces him through the role he loves, that of the persecuted exile, which he never was. His output is slight: lectures, a thesis, an allegorical poem seized and later printed abroad. He lives on letters and crises, beats the wall, and weeps on the chronicler's shoulder; Varvara Petrovna invented him and was the first to believe in the invention. For the sake of convenience they marry him to the ward Darya, and his son Pyotr reads aloud his letter on "other people's sins"; Varvara throws him out.
At the literary matinee, he climbs the platform to reconcile the generations, says that without beauty humanity cannot live, and is booed. He flees on foot along the road, falls ill at an inn, and asks Sofya Matveyevna for the passage about the pigs, which he applies to Russia, to himself, and to his son. In the crisis, he confesses that the main thing is that he himself believes in himself when he lies.
Varvara Petrovna arrives and takes him in, and he tells her for the first time, in French, that he has loved her all his life. Before dying, confessed and communed, he makes a profession of faith about love and immortality: if there is a God, he too is immortal. The novel does not decide whether it is a late conversion or the last reasoning of someone who always argued from affection.