What It Is
The road is the last setting of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky. After more than twenty years living with Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina, he leaves on foot, with an umbrella and a cane, a bag over his shoulder, without a passport and with no destination that could be named aloud, and he makes a French phrase, vive la grande route, his motto. The chronicler explains it: asking for horses would get him detained by Varvara Petrovna, getting a passport would oblige him to say where he is going, and any town would make the venture ridiculous in his eyes. The road, on the contrary, is long and endless like human life. On the road is the idea, and in the passport is the end of the idea. The stretch he covers is short, a few versts and a few days, and at its end there is a village bed and a carriage that catches up with him.
Where It Appears
The departure on foot is announced long before. In Chapter III of Part One, Stepan asks the chronicler whether he takes him for someone without the moral strength to pick up the beggar's bag and disappear, out of honor and a principle of independence.
In Chapter IV of Part Two, Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky tells his father the word that the road is going to answer.
ты был приживальщиком, то есть лакеем добровольным, you were a hanger-on, that is, a voluntary lackey.
In Chapter V of Part Two, after Varvara Petrovna offers him three thousand rubles a year to live far away from her, Stepan announces that, whether he wins or loses at the matinee reading, he will leave on foot the same night, with a beggar's bag, to die of hunger under a fence.
In Chapter II of Part Three, after the scandal at the matinee, Stepan locks himself in and writes to Darya Pavlovna Shatova that the die is cast, that he is leaving the town forever, and that he does not know where he is going.
In Chapter III of Part Three, on the road that Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina takes with Mavriky Nikolaevich, his figure emerges from the mist: high hussar boots, a belt of varnished leather, a wide-brimmed hat, a stuffed bag, a cane, and an open umbrella. He falls to his knees before Lizaveta Nikolaevna, says that one must forgive, forgive and forgive, and that he is fleeing delirium to look for Russia. She blesses him with the sign of the cross.
In Chapter VII of Part Three, the chronicler tells the journey. After a verst or a verst and a half along the high road, beside a willow, Stepan gathers the images of the night before and thinks that, if he meets Fedka, he will tell him the whole truth and give him the purse. A cart passes, and he, relieved by the cow tied behind it, follows it. When they ask him who he is, he says in French that he is not a merchant, that he is something else, and in a flash he declares himself the chief professor. At Khatovo he buys a Gospel, on impulse, from Sofya Matveyevna Ulitina, and takes it with him in the cart to Spassov. The peasants distrust him, until an old servant recognizes him and introduces him as a great sage. In a village by a lake he falls ill, and in the crisis of the early morning he falls at her feet.
Главное в том, что я сам себе верю, когда лгу. Всего труднее в жизни жить и не лгать… и… и собственной лжи не верить, да, да, вот это именно, the main thing is that I myself believe in myself when I lie. The hardest thing in life is to live and not lie... and... and not to believe one's own lie, yes, yes, that is exactly it.
J’ai menti toute ma vie, всю, всю жизнь!, I have lied all my life, all, all my life! And, further on, to everyone:да здравствует Великая Мысль! Вечная, безмерная Мысль, long live the Great Idea! The eternal, boundless Idea.
Varvara Petrovna arrives by carriage at his resting place, drives Sofya Matveyevna away and calls her back in the same breath. Before dying, Stepan confesses and takes communion willingly, and gives his profession of faith.
Мое бессмертие уже потому необходимо, что бог не захочет сделать неправды и погасить совсем огонь раз возгоревшейся к нему любви в моем сердце. И что дороже любви? Любовь выше бытия, любовь венец бытия, и как же возможно, чтобы бытие было ей неподклонно? Если я полюбил его и обрадовался любви моей — возможно ли, чтоб он погасил и меня и радость мою и обратил нас в нуль? Если есть бог, то и я бессмертен! Voilà ma profession de foi, my immortality is necessary already for this reason: God will not want to commit an injustice and extinguish entirely the fire of love for him that was kindled in my heart. And what is dearer than love? Love is higher than being, love is the crown of being, and how could being not be subject to it? If I loved him and rejoiced in my love, is it possible that he would extinguish me and my joy and reduce us to nothing? If there is a God, then I too am immortal! Voilà ma profession de foi.
What It Means
For Stepan, the road is the place without paper. At home he was the professor, the persecuted one, the hanger-on, the invented one, and each name had an owner. On the road no one knows who he is, and he can be whatever he says he is, until even that freedom turns into a new lie: the chief professor, the friend of the people who never saw the people up close, the preacher of a Gospel he barely read. The book lets him lose himself in this enjoyment during the journey, up to the illness and the crisis of the early morning. The road gives him what the drawing room did not, the ear of a woman who listens to him for hours and to whom he can say that he has lied all his life, and it also gives him death far from the house that invented him, but with the inventor at his side.
The motto says that the idea lives on the road and dies in the passport, and the novel fulfills the phrase to the letter: Stepan never reaches any place, and he dies where the idea ends, in a village bed, with Varvara Petrovna's carriage at the door. Two readings fit. In one, the road is a pilgrimage, and the old man who spent his life in civic poses arrives, on foot, at the confession and communion his home never asked of him. In the other, it is flight: from Varvara Petrovna, from his son, from the dead of Zarechye, and from having to say where he is, and whoever flees can only be overtaken. The text does not choose. What it shows is a man who, saying for the first time that he has lied all his life, still needs a Great Idea in order to die in peace: the road has changed the content of the pose, not the pose.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Truth and lies, God and the divine, Family.
- Themes in the work: Truth and lies, God and the divine, Family.
- Characters: Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina, Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, Darya Pavlovna Shatova, Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina, the chronicler.
- Neighboring symbols: The pigs and the epigraph, the passage Stepan reads in bed at the end of the road, and The fire at Zarechye, whose glow he says he saw all night before leaving.