its name?'
'By the way you put it, I must inevitably conclude, and, I suppose, as quickly as possible, that it is the Russian nation ...'
'And you're laughing already—oh, what a tribe!' Shatov reared up.
'Calm yourself, I beg you; on the contrary, I precisely expected something of this sort.'
'Expected something of this sort? And are these words not familiar to you?'
'Quite familiar; I see only too well what you're driving at. Your whole phrase and even the expression 'god- bearing' nation is simply the conclusion of our conversation that took place more than two years ago, abroad, not long before your departure for America ... At least as far as I now recall.'
'The phrase is entirely yours, not mine. Your own, and not merely the conclusion of our conversation. There wasn't any 'our' conversation: there was a teacher uttering immense words, and there was a disciple who rose from the dead. I am that disciple and you are the teacher.'
'But, if you recall, it was precisely after my words that you joined that society, and only then left for America.'
'Yes, and I wrote to you about it from America; I wrote to you about everything. Yes, I could not all at once tear myself bloodily from what I had grown fast to since childhood, to which I had given all the raptures of my hopes and all the tears of my hatred ... It is hard to change gods. I did not believe you then because I did not want to believe, and I clung for the last time to this filthy cesspool... But the seed remained and grew. Seriously, tell me seriously, did you read to the end of my letter from America? Perhaps you didn't read it at all?'
'I read three pages of it, the first two and the last, and glanced quickly over the middle as well. Though I kept meaning to...'
'Eh, it makes no difference, to hell with it!' Shatov waved his hand. 'If you've now renounced those words about the nation, how could you have uttered them then?... That's what weighs on me now.'
'But I was not joking with you then, either; in persuading you, I was perhaps more concerned with myself than with you,' Stavrogin said mysteriously.
'Not joking! In America I lay on straw for three months next to a certain... unfortunate man, and I learned from him that at the very same time as you were planting God and the motherland in my heart— at that very same time, perhaps even in those very same days, you were pouring poison into the heart of this unfortunate man, this maniac, Kirillov ... You confirmed lies and slander in him and drove his reason to frenzy... Go and look at him now, he's your creation... You've seen him, however.'
'First, I shall note for you that Kirillov himself has just told me he is happy and he is beautiful. Your assumption that all this happened at one and the same time is almost correct; well, and what of it? I repeat, I was not deceiving either one of you.'
'You are an atheist? An atheist now?'
'Yes.'
'And then?'
'Exactly the same as then.'
'I wasn't asking your respect for myself when I began this conversation; with your intelligence, you should have understood that,' Shatov muttered indignantly.
'I didn't get up at your first word, didn't close the conversation, didn't walk out on you, but have sat here all the while humbly answering your questions and... shouts, which means that my respect for you is still intact.'
Shatov interrupted him, waving his hand:
'Do you remember your expression: 'An atheist cannot be Russian, an atheist immediately ceases to be Russian'—remember that?'
'Really?' Nikolai Vsevolodovich seemed to want the question repeated.
'You ask? You've forgotten? And yet this is one of the most precise indications of one of the main peculiarities of the Russian spirit, which you figured out. You can't have forgotten it? I'll remind you of more— you said at the same time: 'He who is not Orthodox cannot be Russian.’”
'A Slavophil notion, I suppose.'
'No, the Slavophils nowadays disavow it. People have grown smarter nowadays. But you went even further: you believed that Roman Catholicism was no longer Christianity; you affirmed that Rome proclaimed a Christ who had succumbed to the third temptation of the devil, and that, having announced to the whole world that Christ cannot stand on earth without an earthly kingdom, Catholicism thereby proclaimed the Antichrist, thus ruining the whole Western world. You precisely pointed out that if France is suffering, Catholicism alone is to blame, for she rejected the foul Roman God but has not found a new one. That is what you were able to say then! I remember our conversations.'[91]
'If I had belief, I would no doubt repeat it now as well; I wasn't lying, speaking as a believer,' Nikolai Vsevolodovich said very seriously. 'But I assure you that this repetition of my past thoughts produces an all too unpleasant impression on me. Couldn't you stop?'
'If you had belief?' Shatov cried, paying not the slightest attention to the request. 'But wasn't it you who told me that if someone proved to you mathematically that the truth is outside Christ, you would better agree to stay with Christ than with the truth?[92] Did you say that? Did you?'
'But allow me also to ask, finally,' Stavrogin raised his voice, 'what this whole impatient and... spiteful examination is leading to?'
'This examination will end forever and you will never be reminded of it.'
'You keep insisting that we are outside space and time...'
'Be silent!' Shatov suddenly shouted. 'I'm stupid and clumsy, but let my name perish in ridiculousness! Will you permit me to repeat before you your main thought of that time... Oh, only ten lines, just the conclusion.'
