Pyotr Character Analysis

While abroad Shatov radically revised certain of his former socialist convictions and jumped to the opposite extreme. He was one of those idealistic Russian beings who are suddenly struck by some powerful idea and immediately, then and there, seem to be crushed by it, even sometimes permanently. They are never equipped to deal with it, and instead come to believe in it passionately, and so their entire life from then on passes in its final throes, as it were, under the stone that has fallen upon them and already crushed them half to death.

‘Each people has its own concept of evil and good, and its own evil and good. When many different peoples begin to hold concepts of evil and good in common, then the peoples die out, and then the very difference between evil and good begins to blur and disappear. Reason has never had the power of defining evil and good or separating evil from good, even approximately. On the contrary, it has always mixed them up in a shameful and pitiful fashion, whereas science has found solutions by sheer force.’

‘Oh, Nikolay Vsevolodovich,’ he exclaimed, ‘what troubled me most of all was that this was completely against all civil laws, and primarily those of the fatherland! Suddenly they would print that people should go out with pitchforks, and remember that he who went out poor in the morning could return home rich in the evening. Just think of it, sir! I was shaking in my boots, but I was distributing them. Or suddenly there would be five or six lines addressed to all of Russia, for no good reason: “Lock the churches as soon as you can, destroy God, violate marriages, destroy the rights of inheritance, take up knives”, that’s all, and the Devil knows what else. That was the piece of paper, with the five lines, that I was almost caught with, but the officers of the regiment gave me a good beating and then, God bless them, let me go.’

‘That’s to say, that watchman and me, we brung all the stuff together, and later on, towards mornin’, by the river, we got to quarrellin’ as to who was gonna carry the sack. I sinned, I lightened his burden a bit.’

‘Kill some more, steal some more.’

‘Pyotr Stepanovich is handin’ me that same advice, in them same words as you, ’cause he’s a real stingy and hard-hearted man when it comes to givin’ assistance. Besides which, he ain’t got no belief at all in the heavenly creator, who fashioned us out o’ the dust of the earth. He says it’s jes’ nature made everythin’, even down to the last animal.’

‘Lizaveta Nikolayevna, really and truly, you can grind me in a mortar, but he’s innocent; on the contrary, he’s been crushed and is raving, as you can see. He’s not guilty of anything, of anything, even in thought! It’s all the doing of robbers who will certainly be found in a week and punished by flogging. It’s all the fault of Fedka the Convict and the Shpigulin workers; the whole town is chattering about it, and that’s why I am too.’

‘Is that so? Is that so?’ Liza was waiting, all atremble, for the final verdict.

‘I didn’t kill them and I was against it, but I knew they would be killed, and I didn’t stop the killers. Step away from me, Liza,’ Stavrogin said, and he went into the drawing room.

Liza covered her face with her hands and went out of the house.

‘[…] Yesterday on the bridge one little demon offered to kill Lebyadkin and Marya Timofeyevna to solve the problem of my lawful marriage and leave no traces of it behind. He asked for three silver roubles as an advance, but let it clearly be known that the whole procedure would cost no less than fifteen hundred. There’s a calculating demon for you! A bookkeeper! Ha, ha!’

[…]

‘[…] It was just Fedka the Convict, a robber who’s escaped from hard labour. But that’s not the point. What do you think I did? I gave him all the money in my wallet, and he’s now utterly convinced that I gave him an advance!’ […]

‘You ran across him at night and he made you an offer like that? Can you really not see that they’ve completely entangled you in their net!’

‘Oh, let them!’

‘Please don’t worry about Verkhovensky,’ she said, concluding the conversation. ‘If he had been party to any mischief, then he wouldn’t have talked as he has with you and with others here. Phrasemongers aren’t dangerous, and let me say that even if something should happen, I will certainly be the first to find out about it from him. He is fanatically devoted to me, fanatically.’

I will note, in anticipation of events, that if it hadn’t been for Yuliya Mikhaylovna’s self-importance and ambition, perhaps everything that these wretched little people managed to inflict on us wouldn’t have happened. She had a great deal to answer for!

When the expedition had ridden down from the bridge and had drawn up beside the town hotel, someone suddenly announced that the body of a guest who had shot himself had just been discovered in one of the hotel rooms, and that they were waiting for the police. Immediately the idea was floated of having a look at the suicide. The idea found support; our ladies had never seen a suicide. I remember that one of them said aloud, then and there, that ‘everything’s become so boring that there’s no point in being fastidious about one’s amusements as long as they were diverting’.

‘As far as I can see and as far as I can judge, the whole essence of the Russian revolutionary idea is contained in the denial of honour. I’m pleased that this is so boldly and fearlessly expressed. No, in Europe they can’t yet understand this, but here in Russia this is precisely what they will seize upon. For a Russian, honour is only an unnecessary burden. What’s more, it has always been a burden, for his entire history. He can be carried away by an open “right to dishonour” sooner than anything else. I’m of the old generation, and I still stand for honour, I admit it, but it’s really only out of habit. The only reason I like the old forms is, let’s say, out of faint-heartedness; one really must finish out one’s days somehow.’

‘Here’s something to make you laugh: the first thing that has a tremendous effect is a uniform. There’s nothing more powerful than a uniform. I make a point of dreaming up ranks and offices: I have secretaries, secret agents, treasurers, chairmen, registrars, their colleagues — it’s a lot of fun and it has really caught on. After that, the second most powerful force is, of course, sentimentality. You know, socialism in Russia is spreading primarily out of sentimentality.’

Every one of these five operatives formed the first group in the fervent belief that it was merely a unit that linked hundreds and thousands of similar groups of five, just like theirs, scattered throughout Russia, and that everything depended on some huge but secret central organization that, in turn, was organically linked with the universal European revolution.

‘People cry: “A hundred million heads”. That’s perhaps just a metaphor, but why be afraid of them, if despotism, with its slow paper daydreams, in a hundred years or so will consume not a hundred but five hundred million heads? […] therefore I respectfully ask this worthy company not to vote, but to declare, directly and simply, what makes you happier: a tortoise-like procession in the swamp, or crossing the swamp under full sail?’

‘I’m absolutely for full sail!’ the high-school student cried enthusiastically.

‘So am I,’ replied Lyamshin.

[…]

‘I must admit that I’m more for a humane solution,’ said the major, ‘but since everyone is for yours, then I’ll go along with the rest.’

‘But one or two generations of debauchery are essential now — unprecedented, utterly vile debauchery, when people turn into nasty, cowardly, cruel, self-centred scum — that’s what we need! And with “a little fresh blood” besides, so that they can get used to it. Why are you laughing? I’m not contradicting myself. I’m only contradicting philanthropists and Shigalyovism, but not myself. I’m a scoundrel, and not a socialist.’

[…]

‘So you’re not really a socialist, but some sort of political… self-seeker.’

‘A scoundrel, a scoundrel […] the whole carnival sideshow will collapse, and then we’ll think about how to put up a structure of stone. For the first time! We shall do the building, we, we alone!’

What’s he doing there?’

‘He’s putting out the fire, Your Excellency.’

‘That’s impossible. The fire is in people’s minds, and not on the roofs of houses. Pull him down and leave everything!’

A curious fact had come to light: on the very outskirts of the quarter, on a piece of empty ground, beyond the vegetable gardens, no less than fifty paces from the other buildings, stood a small wooden house that had just been built, and this isolated house had caught fire almost before all the others, at the very beginning of the conflagration. […] As it turned out, the house had caught fire on its own and independently, and therefore suspiciously. But the main thing was that it had not actually burned down, and inside it, towards dawn, surprising things were discovered […] there were tenants in the house — a captain who was well known in the town, his sister and an aged servant of theirs; and these tenants — the captain, his sister and the servant — all three of them had had their throats cut during the night, and had evidently been robbed.

Virginsky suddenly flared up, ‘I protest… I protest as vigorously as I can… I want… This is what I want: when he gets here, I want all of us to come out and ask him. If it’s true, then we accept his repentance, and if he gives his word of honour, then we let him go. In any case, we’ll have a trial; we’ll have a trial; we’ll act only after a trial. And not us hiding, and then falling upon him.’

‘To put the common cause at risk because of someone’s word of honour is the height of stupidity!’

‘Having given the matter a great deal of thought, I have decided that the proposed murder is not only a waste of valuable time, which could be used in a more essential and relevant way, but above and beyond that, it represents the sort of pernicious deviation from the normal path that has always done the utmost harm to the cause and has sidetracked its successes for decades, by subordinating itself to the influence of frivolous and primarily political people, instead of pure socialists.’

‘For me there is no higher idea than the nonexistence of God. Human history is behind me. Man has done nothing but invent God in order to live without killing himself; that’s the essence of world history to this point. I am the only one in world history who hasn’t felt like inventing God for the first time. Let people find that out once and for all.’

‘He won’t shoot himself,’ an alarmed Pyotr Stepanovich was thinking.

‘A great many ideas are coming to me now: you see, it’s just like our Russia. These demons who come out of the sick man and enter the swine — these are all the sores, all the contagions, all the uncleanness, all the demons, large and small, who have accumulated in our great and beloved sick man, our Russia, over the course of centuries, centuries! […] and I perhaps am the first, standing at the very head; and we shall throw ourselves, the madmen and the possessed, from a rock into the sea and we shall all drown, and that’s no more than we deserve, because that’s precisely what we’re fit for. But the sick man will be healed and “will sit at the feet of Jesus.”’

To the question of why so many murders, scandals and vile acts had been committed, [Lyamshin] answered with feverish haste that it was for the purpose of ‘systematically shaking the foundations, systematically undermining society and all principles; for the purpose of demoralizing everyone and throwing everything into chaos, and then, once society had begun to totter as a result — and was sick and weakened, cynical and devoid of beliefs, yet still yearning for some guiding idea and self-preservation — they would suddenly take it into their hands, raising the banner of rebellion and relying on a complete network of groups of five, which would all be active at the same time, recruiting and making practical efforts to search out all the means and all the weak spots that could be exploited’.

While abroad Shatov radically revised certain of his former socialist convictions and jumped to the opposite extreme. He was one of those idealistic Russian beings who are suddenly struck by some powerful idea and immediately, then and there, seem to be crushed by it, even sometimes permanently. They are never equipped to deal with it, and instead come to believe in it passionately, and so their entire life from then on passes in its final throes, as it were, under the stone that has fallen upon them and already crushed them half to death.

‘Each people has its own concept of evil and good, and its own evil and good. When many different peoples begin to hold concepts of evil and good in common, then the peoples die out, and then the very difference between evil and good begins to blur and disappear. Reason has never had the power of defining evil and good or separating evil from good, even approximately. On the contrary, it has always mixed them up in a shameful and pitiful fashion, whereas science has found solutions by sheer force.’

‘Oh, Nikolay Vsevolodovich,’ he exclaimed, ‘what troubled me most of all was that this was completely against all civil laws, and primarily those of the fatherland! Suddenly they would print that people should go out with pitchforks, and remember that he who went out poor in the morning could return home rich in the evening. Just think of it, sir! I was shaking in my boots, but I was distributing them. Or suddenly there would be five or six lines addressed to all of Russia, for no good reason: “Lock the churches as soon as you can, destroy God, violate marriages, destroy the rights of inheritance, take up knives”, that’s all, and the Devil knows what else. That was the piece of paper, with the five lines, that I was almost caught with, but the officers of the regiment gave me a good beating and then, God bless them, let me go.’

‘That’s to say, that watchman and me, we brung all the stuff together, and later on, towards mornin’, by the river, we got to quarrellin’ as to who was gonna carry the sack. I sinned, I lightened his burden a bit.’

‘Kill some more, steal some more.’

‘Pyotr Stepanovich is handin’ me that same advice, in them same words as you, ’cause he’s a real stingy and hard-hearted man when it comes to givin’ assistance. Besides which, he ain’t got no belief at all in the heavenly creator, who fashioned us out o’ the dust of the earth. He says it’s jes’ nature made everythin’, even down to the last animal.’

‘Lizaveta Nikolayevna, really and truly, you can grind me in a mortar, but he’s innocent; on the contrary, he’s been crushed and is raving, as you can see. He’s not guilty of anything, of anything, even in thought! It’s all the doing of robbers who will certainly be found in a week and punished by flogging. It’s all the fault of Fedka the Convict and the Shpigulin workers; the whole town is chattering about it, and that’s why I am too.’

‘Is that so? Is that so?’ Liza was waiting, all atremble, for the final verdict.

‘I didn’t kill them and I was against it, but I knew they would be killed, and I didn’t stop the killers. Step away from me, Liza,’ Stavrogin said, and he went into the drawing room.

Liza covered her face with her hands and went out of the house.

‘[…] Yesterday on the bridge one little demon offered to kill Lebyadkin and Marya Timofeyevna to solve the problem of my lawful marriage and leave no traces of it behind. He asked for three silver roubles as an advance, but let it clearly be known that the whole procedure would cost no less than fifteen hundred. There’s a calculating demon for you! A bookkeeper! Ha, ha!’

[…]

‘[…] It was just Fedka the Convict, a robber who’s escaped from hard labour. But that’s not the point. What do you think I did? I gave him all the money in my wallet, and he’s now utterly convinced that I gave him an advance!’ […]

‘You ran across him at night and he made you an offer like that? Can you really not see that they’ve completely entangled you in their net!’

‘Oh, let them!’

‘Please don’t worry about Verkhovensky,’ she said, concluding the conversation. ‘If he had been party to any mischief, then he wouldn’t have talked as he has with you and with others here. Phrasemongers aren’t dangerous, and let me say that even if something should happen, I will certainly be the first to find out about it from him. He is fanatically devoted to me, fanatically.’

I will note, in anticipation of events, that if it hadn’t been for Yuliya Mikhaylovna’s self-importance and ambition, perhaps everything that these wretched little people managed to inflict on us wouldn’t have happened. She had a great deal to answer for!

When the expedition had ridden down from the bridge and had drawn up beside the town hotel, someone suddenly announced that the body of a guest who had shot himself had just been discovered in one of the hotel rooms, and that they were waiting for the police. Immediately the idea was floated of having a look at the suicide. The idea found support; our ladies had never seen a suicide. I remember that one of them said aloud, then and there, that ‘everything’s become so boring that there’s no point in being fastidious about one’s amusements as long as they were diverting’.

‘As far as I can see and as far as I can judge, the whole essence of the Russian revolutionary idea is contained in the denial of honour. I’m pleased that this is so boldly and fearlessly expressed. No, in Europe they can’t yet understand this, but here in Russia this is precisely what they will seize upon. For a Russian, honour is only an unnecessary burden. What’s more, it has always been a burden, for his entire history. He can be carried away by an open “right to dishonour” sooner than anything else. I’m of the old generation, and I still stand for honour, I admit it, but it’s really only out of habit. The only reason I like the old forms is, let’s say, out of faint-heartedness; one really must finish out one’s days somehow.’

‘Here’s something to make you laugh: the first thing that has a tremendous effect is a uniform. There’s nothing more powerful than a uniform. I make a point of dreaming up ranks and offices: I have secretaries, secret agents, treasurers, chairmen, registrars, their colleagues — it’s a lot of fun and it has really caught on. After that, the second most powerful force is, of course, sentimentality. You know, socialism in Russia is spreading primarily out of sentimentality.’

Every one of these five operatives formed the first group in the fervent belief that it was merely a unit that linked hundreds and thousands of similar groups of five, just like theirs, scattered throughout Russia, and that everything depended on some huge but secret central organization that, in turn, was organically linked with the universal European revolution.

‘People cry: “A hundred million heads”. That’s perhaps just a metaphor, but why be afraid of them, if despotism, with its slow paper daydreams, in a hundred years or so will consume not a hundred but five hundred million heads? […] therefore I respectfully ask this worthy company not to vote, but to declare, directly and simply, what makes you happier: a tortoise-like procession in the swamp, or crossing the swamp under full sail?’

‘I’m absolutely for full sail!’ the high-school student cried enthusiastically.

‘So am I,’ replied Lyamshin.

[…]

‘I must admit that I’m more for a humane solution,’ said the major, ‘but since everyone is for yours, then I’ll go along with the rest.’

‘But one or two generations of debauchery are essential now — unprecedented, utterly vile debauchery, when people turn into nasty, cowardly, cruel, self-centred scum — that’s what we need! And with “a little fresh blood” besides, so that they can get used to it. Why are you laughing? I’m not contradicting myself. I’m only contradicting philanthropists and Shigalyovism, but not myself. I’m a scoundrel, and not a socialist.’

[…]

‘So you’re not really a socialist, but some sort of political… self-seeker.’

‘A scoundrel, a scoundrel […] the whole carnival sideshow will collapse, and then we’ll think about how to put up a structure of stone. For the first time! We shall do the building, we, we alone!’

What’s he doing there?’

‘He’s putting out the fire, Your Excellency.’

‘That’s impossible. The fire is in people’s minds, and not on the roofs of houses. Pull him down and leave everything!’

A curious fact had come to light: on the very outskirts of the quarter, on a piece of empty ground, beyond the vegetable gardens, no less than fifty paces from the other buildings, stood a small wooden house that had just been built, and this isolated house had caught fire almost before all the others, at the very beginning of the conflagration. […] As it turned out, the house had caught fire on its own and independently, and therefore suspiciously. But the main thing was that it had not actually burned down, and inside it, towards dawn, surprising things were discovered […] there were tenants in the house — a captain who was well known in the town, his sister and an aged servant of theirs; and these tenants — the captain, his sister and the servant — all three of them had had their throats cut during the night, and had evidently been robbed.

Virginsky suddenly flared up, ‘I protest… I protest as vigorously as I can… I want… This is what I want: when he gets here, I want all of us to come out and ask him. If it’s true, then we accept his repentance, and if he gives his word of honour, then we let him go. In any case, we’ll have a trial; we’ll have a trial; we’ll act only after a trial. And not us hiding, and then falling upon him.’

‘To put the common cause at risk because of someone’s word of honour is the height of stupidity!’

‘Having given the matter a great deal of thought, I have decided that the proposed murder is not only a waste of valuable time, which could be used in a more essential and relevant way, but above and beyond that, it represents the sort of pernicious deviation from the normal path that has always done the utmost harm to the cause and has sidetracked its successes for decades, by subordinating itself to the influence of frivolous and primarily political people, instead of pure socialists.’

‘For me there is no higher idea than the nonexistence of God. Human history is behind me. Man has done nothing but invent God in order to live without killing himself; that’s the essence of world history to this point. I am the only one in world history who hasn’t felt like inventing God for the first time. Let people find that out once and for all.’

‘He won’t shoot himself,’ an alarmed Pyotr Stepanovich was thinking.

‘A great many ideas are coming to me now: you see, it’s just like our Russia. These demons who come out of the sick man and enter the swine — these are all the sores, all the contagions, all the uncleanness, all the demons, large and small, who have accumulated in our great and beloved sick man, our Russia, over the course of centuries, centuries! […] and I perhaps am the first, standing at the very head; and we shall throw ourselves, the madmen and the possessed, from a rock into the sea and we shall all drown, and that’s no more than we deserve, because that’s precisely what we’re fit for. But the sick man will be healed and “will sit at the feet of Jesus.”’

To the question of why so many murders, scandals and vile acts had been committed, [Lyamshin] answered with feverish haste that it was for the purpose of ‘systematically shaking the foundations, systematically undermining society and all principles; for the purpose of demoralizing everyone and throwing everything into chaos, and then, once society had begun to totter as a result — and was sick and weakened, cynical and devoid of beliefs, yet still yearning for some guiding idea and self-preservation — they would suddenly take it into their hands, raising the banner of rebellion and relying on a complete network of groups of five, which would all be active at the same time, recruiting and making practical efforts to search out all the means and all the weak spots that could be exploited’.