Morality and Nihilism Theme 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.

‘Man is afraid of death because he loves life, that’s how I understand it,’ I observed, ‘and nature has ordained it so.’

‘That’s vile, and that’s the basis of the whole deception!’ His eyes began to flash. ‘Life is pain, life is fear and man is unhappy. Now all is pain and fear. Now man loves life because he loves pain and fear. And that’s how he’s been made. Now life is given in exchange for pain and fear, and that’s the basis of the whole deception. Now man is still not what he should be. There will be a new man, happy and proud. Whoever doesn’t care whether he lives or doesn’t live, he will be the new man. Whoever conquers pain and fear, he himself will be God. And that other God will no longer be.’

‘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.’

‘And is it […] true that in Petersburg you belonged to some secret society that practised bestial carnality? Is it true that the Marquis de Sade could have taken lessons from you? Is it true that you seduced and debauched children?’ […]

‘I did say these words, but I didn’t harm any children,’ Stavrogin pronounced, but only after a very prolonged silence. He had turned pale, and his eyes blazed.

‘But you said them!’ Shatov continued imperiously, not taking his flashing eyes off him. ‘Is it true that you stated you didn’t make a distinction between the beauty of any instance of bestial carnality and a heroic deed of any kind, even the sacrifice of one’s life for humanity? Is it true that you found equal beauty and identical pleasure in both these extremes?’

‘It’s impossible to answer like this… I don’t want to answer,’ Stavrogin muttered.

‘You got married out of a passion for inflicting torment, out of a passion for feeling the pangs of conscience, out of moral carnality […] When you bit the governor’s ear, did you feel a surge of carnality? Did you feel it? You idle, footloose son of a landowner, did you feel it?’

‘You’re a psychologist,’ Stavrogin was growing increasingly pale, ‘although you are partly mistaken about the reasons for my marriage…’

‘Nikolay Vsevolodovich, Nikolay Vsevolodovich, this cannot be, perhaps you’ll give it some more thought, you won’t want to lay hands on… What will people say, what will the world say?’

‘Oh, I’m hardly afraid of your world. After all, I did marry your sister then, when I felt like it, after a drunken dinner, on a bet for wine, and now I’m going to proclaim it for all to hear — why not, if it amuses me now?’

‘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!’

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.’

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.

Suddenly someone shouted: ‘It’s Stavrogin’s woman!’ Then: ‘It’s not enough for them to commit murder, they have to come and look!’ Suddenly I saw someone’s hand raised above her head from behind, and then it came down; Liza fell. Mavriky Nikolayevich let out a dreadful cry and rushed to help her, hitting with all his strength a man who was trying to block his way. But at that very instant the tradesman grabbed him from behind with both hands. For some time it was impossible to make anything out in the scuffle that ensued. Liza seemed to get up, but fell again from another blow.

[…]

As an eyewitness, albeit a distant one, I had to give evidence at the inquest: I stated that everything had happened quite accidentally, the work of people who, though perhaps incited, were scarcely aware of what they were doing as they were drunk and disorderly. I hold this opinion even now.

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.’

‘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’.