At the center of the drama stands Stavrogin, the magnetic yet empty aristocrat around whom the other characters, in Dostoevsky's words, 'revolve as in a kaleidoscope.' 'Everything is contained in the character of Stavrogin-Stavrogin is EVERYTHING,' Dostoevsky wrote in his notebooks.25 An air of mystery hangs over his entrance onto the scene. His face is likened to a mask; and his first activities-grabbing one man by the nose and biting another one's ear-are seen as offenses against society by a 'wild beast showing his claws.' Like the beast of the apocalypse, this human beast has many heads. He is the progenitor of all the 'devils' in the novel ('Devils' being a more accurate translation of the Russian title, Besy, than 'Possessed').
Superficially he is 'a paragon of beauty,' surrounded by women, yet unable to have a complete relationship with any of them. Dasha is only a nurse to him, Lisa an unsatisfactory sex partner, and Maria Lebiadkin a maimed and estranged wife. There is a hint of illicit relationship with a small girl in his confession; but whether or not the novel includes this section, the story is still dominated by his ideological relationships with other men. Three of his disciples are among the most original creations in Russian literature: Shigalev, Kirillov, and Shatov. Each is inspired by Stavrogin with an idea that drives him to destruction. Each incarnates one aspect of the revolutionary trinity, liberty, equality, fraternity. Their collective epitaph is provided by the words of Babeuf, which Kirillov writes just before killing himself: Liberte, egalite, fraternite ou la mort. Shigalev represents absolute equality with his demand that mountains be leveled and human anthills raised in their place. Kirillov preaches absolute freedom,
which he asserts by committing an heroic and purely ideological suicide. Shatov's ideal is absolute fraternity, which he associates with the peasant life of the Russian people.
Shigalev is modeled on Bartholomew Zaitsev, one of the most extreme iconoclasts of the sixties, who had been a close journalistic associate of Pisarev and then had fled abroad to join Bakunin in active revolutionary agitation. Kirillov offers a majestic distillation of the Schopenhauerian argument for suicide and is one of Dostoevsky's greatest creations. The only ultimate way to prove one's freedom is freely to will one's own destruction. Any other act merely serves some earthly purpose and is subject to the various determining factors of the material world. But uncaused suicide is a supreme vote of confidence in man's freedom from, and triumph over, the natural world. By this one heroic stroke man can become a kind of God. Shatov is, together with Kirillov, the figure with whom Dostoevsky demonstrates greatest sympathy. They are both brought back from America to Russia by Stavrogin to live on Bogoiavlensky (Epiphany) street. They are both looking for a new epiphany, the appearance of the lost God: Kirillov in himself, Shatov in the Russian people. Shatov was originally modeled on an Old Believer whom Dostoevsky met in 1868; but he becomes a kind of God-seeking spokesman of Dostoevsky's own curious brand of populism. Stavrogin has taken away his belief in God and his roots with his peasant past. Unlike Kirillov, whose name is derived from one of the founding saints of Russia and whose dedication to an idea is saintly in intensity, Shatov is plagued by doubts, as his name (derived from shatanie, or 'wavering') indicates. Whereas Kirillov's moment of truth comes in self-destruction, Shatov's comes in hitting Stavrogin. 'I can't tear you out of my heart, Nicholas Stavrogin,' he cries, as he-like populism itself-slowly drifts into alliance with the revolutionary forces around him. 'I believe in Russia … in Orthodoxy … I believe that the new advent will take place on Russian soil. … In God. I, I will believe in God.'
Stavrogin is the dark, malignant force in Russian intellectual life which kept Dostoevsky, like Shatov, from making a confident affirmation of belief in God and of harmonious communion with his creation. Dostoevsky is very explicit in stating what the nature of that evil force is, when he compares Stavrogin to the radical Decembrist Lunin and the brooding poet Ler-montov:
There was perhaps more malice in Stavrogin than in these two put together, but this malice was cold, calm, and if one may put it that way rational, which means that it was the most abominable and terrible kind of malice.
Stavrogin's evil is reason without faith: cold intellect born in aristocratic boredom, nurtured during a scientific expedition to Iceland, confirmed by study in a German university, and brought by way of St. Petersburg to the Russian people. It is because he is rational, because he is 'a wise serpent' that his power is so truly terrifying.
Yet Stavrogin is also a symbol of the Russian intelligentsia, a bearer of its prophetic hopes, which Dostoevsky himself partially shared. Stavrogin was tutored by Stepan Trofimovich, the incarnation of the romantic aristocratic intellectual; he is compared to figures like Lunin and Lermontov and represents a kind of fulfillment of both of their quests. He was created by Dostoevsky in the midst of his search for a new positive hero. He bears the Greek word for cross (stavros) within his name, has been to Jerusalem, and is called 'Prince Harry,' Shakespeare's future king Henry V who was destined to save England after sowing his wild oats. In his notebooks Dostoevsky referred to Stavrogin as 'Prince' and, in a key chapter heading, as 'Ivan the Tsarevich': the murdered son of Ivan the Terrible whom Russian folklore taught would return to deliver Russia. In some sense, Dostoevsky is saying that the future of Russia belongs to Stavrogin: to the aristocratic intelligentsia. The intelligentsia-the alienated and elect of history- cannot be bypassed because it is possessed by ideas; and without 'a great idea,' 'the people cannot live and will not die.'
The drama of the novel results largely from the struggle of two very special personalities for the raw power that Stavrogin generates and the dark fire that he bears within him. Traditional and revolutionary ideals are struggling for the mind-and thus the future-of Russia. The old is represented by a woman, Maria Lebiadkin, the new by a man, Peter Verkhovensky. The names immediately dramatize the contrasting forces. Maria suggests, of course, the mother of God, the missing Madonna; Peter suggests Peter the Great and the arrogant march of technology and irreverent innovation. Lebiadkin is derived from 'swan' Qebed'), the popular symbol of purity, grace, and redemption; Verkhovensky from 'height,' the classic symbol of pride and arrogance.
The old never has a chance. Just as Musorgsky's 'white swan' is killed early in Khovanshchina, so is Dostoevsky's afflicted with some strange, deep wound even before we meet her. Yet she never blames Stavrogin, who has spurned and humiliated her. Feeling that 'I must have done him some wrong,' she accepts suffering gladly in the spirit of the Old Believers and denounces Stavrogin as the False Dmitry before dying with her
infant baby.
The new and victorious force is that of Verkhovensky, who is, of course, modeled on the conspiratorial Nechaev. Unlike Nechaev, however,
who rejoiced in the total nihilism of his revolutionary ethos, Verkhovensky feels the need of links with the prophetic intelligentsia. Without Stavrogin, he considers himself only 'Columbus without America, a bottled fly.' Verkhovensky's revolutionary party gives us a kind of anticipatory glimpse at the conspiratorial confusion of the Bolsheviks awaiting the arrival of Lenin at the Finland Station. The scene in which Verkhovensky inspires a thug to desecrate an icon by putting a mouse inside its container is an anticipation of the organized sacrilege by the league of the militant godless. The Shpigulin scene, in which Verkhovensky appears in the streets actively agitating among striking workers, illustrates Dostoevsky's unique ability for depicting where events were going rather than merely where they had already been. Based on the first real industrial strike in Russia (which occurred in St. Petersburg in May-June, 1870, while Dostoevsky was completing the novel), the scene is treated not as an isolated, economically motivated demonstration of confused protest but rather as part of the fire in the minds of men. The professional revolutionary organizers who were not to move in among the urban workers for some years are already there in Dostoevsky's novel.26
The future, we are led to believe, belongs to Verkhovensky; for, although his immediate plan came to nought, he escapes at the end and is the only major figure who still seems to have a future ahead of him. There is, to be sure, the hope voiced by Stepan Trofimovich in his last wanderings that the devils will be driven out of Russia,
