What It Is
A spider runs through the novel in four mouths and three sizes. For Alexei Kirillov, it is the little spider that climbs the wall, and he says he is grateful to it for climbing. For Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina, it is an enormous, evil spider, the size of a man, in the place where Stavrogin would take her so that they would live their whole lives looking at it and being afraid. For the five members of the quintet, at Erkel's house, it is the spider of a web in which they fell like flies. And for Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin, in the confession he takes to the bishop, it is a small red spider on a geranium leaf, seen on the day a girl hanged herself because of him, and again, years later, in a dream. The same creature changes owner and meaning each time, and the text never says what it is.
Where It Appears
In Chapter I of Part Two, Stavrogin asks Kirillov whether he still prays, after hearing that the lamp belongs to the old woman. Kirillov answers that he prays to everything: he sees the spider climb the wall, looks at it, and is grateful to it for climbing. His eyes light up again, and Stavrogin watches him without irony.
In Chapter III of Part Three, at Skvorechniki, Lizaveta Nikolaevna refuses to be Stavrogin's nurse and gives her reason in an image: it has always seemed to her that he would take her to some place where the creature lives, and that their life together would be spent in front of it.
Мне всегда казалось, что вы заведете меня в какое-нибудь место, где живет огромный злой паук в человеческий рост, и мы там всю жизнь будем на него глядеть и его бояться, it has always seemed to me that you would take me to some place where there lives an enormous, evil spider, the size of a man, and that we would spend our whole lives there looking at it and being afraid of it.
In Chapter IV of Part Three, Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky dominates the quintet gathered at the house of Ensign Erkel with the news of an accusation that no one has seen, and the chronicler records what happens to the five of them.
Чувствовали, что вдруг как мухи попали в паутину к огромному пауку; злились, но тряслись от страху, they felt that they had suddenly fallen, like flies, into the web of an enormous spider; they were angry, but they trembled with fear.
In "With Tikhon", in the document "From Stavrogin," he tells how, on the last day of a girl of about fourteen whom he had abused, he stood at the window looking at a small red spider on a geranium leaf and forgot himself, while she went to the closet where she would hang herself. He notes that he mentions this trifle to prove how far he controlled his own faculties, and he recalls afterward that, while sitting there, he was already thinking about how he would stand on tiptoe to peer through the crack of the closet. Years later, in a small German town, he dreams of the painting by Claude Lorrain that he saw in Dresden and wakes in tears; against the slanting light of the sunset, he sees a small red spider, and with it the girl on the threshold, her fist raised. It is this image, and not the act, that he says he cannot bear.
What It Means
The spider links characters who never touch. Kirillov looks at it as one of the good facts of the world, and gratitude is part of the doctrine that everything is good for those who know. Lizaveta Nikolaevna and the five see it from the other side: she as the life beside Stavrogin, they as the prison in which Pyotr holds them, and in both cases the verb is to keep looking with fear. Stavrogin carries it in his body, as the small thing that memory fastens to the worst and that the dream returns to him. In none of the scenes is the spider killed or driven away. It is only seen, and what each person does with the seeing shows what each person is.
Two things stand out. The first is that Lizaveta Nikolaevna's enormous spider and the quintet's web are the same image in two mouths, and the text leaves open who the spider is: Lizaveta Nikolaevna places it in her life with Stavrogin, while the scene in which the chronicler uses the image points to Pyotr's will, which holds the five without being named, and the two answers do not exclude each other. The second is that Stavrogin's little spider is the only one he explains himself, and he does so with the justification of someone giving an account: the small detail is offered as proof of his lucidity. It can be read as the memory of a man who notices everything and therefore cannot claim he did not know, or as the defense of someone who prefers to be thought lucid rather than sick. In either case, the small creature carries what the man cannot say in words.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Guilt, Truth and lies, God and the divine.
- Themes in the work: Guilt, Truth and lies, God and the divine.
- Characters: Alexei Kirillov, Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina, Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin, Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky.
- Neighboring symbols: The leaf and the five seconds, in the same conversation as Kirillov's, and The icon and the lamp, which stands in the same corner of the room.