Stavrogin was apparently favoured by fortune: he had charm, education, wealth, and health. In reality he was handicapped to an incalculable degree. After a brilliant brief career in the army and in St. Petersburg society, he withdrew from both and associated with the dregs of the population of that city, with slip-shod government clerks, discharged military men, beggars of the higher class, and drunkards of all sorts. He visited their filthy families, spent days and nights in dark slums and all sorts of low haunts. He threw suspicion of theft on the twelve-year-old daughter of a woman who rented him a room for assignations that he might see her thrashed, and a few days later he raped her. The next day he hated her so he decided to kill her and was preparing to do so when she hanged herself. This is not featured in the novel as it now stands. Until the publication of “Stavrogin's Confession” interpreters of Stavrogin's personality who maintained that he was a sadist were accused of having read something into his character that Dostoievsky did not intend him to have. After committing this “greatest sin in the world,” he determined to cripple his life in the most disgusting way possible, that he might pain his mother, humiliate his family, and shock society. He would marry Marya, a hemiplegic idiot who tidied up his room. After the ceremony he went to stay with his mother, the granddame of their province. He went to distract himself, which included seducing and enslaving Darya, Shatov's sister, a ward of his mother, and a member of the family.
Suddenly, apropos of nothing, he was guilty of incredible outrages upon various persons and, what was most enigmatic, these outrages were utterly unheard of, quite inconceivable, entirely unprovoked and objectless. For instance, one day at the club, he tweaked the nose of an elderly man of high rank in the service. When the Governor of the club sought some explanation Stavrogin told him he would whisper it in his ear.
“When the dear, mild Ivan Ossipovitch hurriedly and trustfully inclined his ear Stavrogin bit it hard. The poor Governor would have died of terror but the monster had mercy on him, and let go his ear.”
The doctor testified that he was temporarily unbalanced, and after a few weeks' rest and isolation he went abroad for four years and there Lizaveta Nikolaevna, Shatov's wife, and several others succumbed, and he also met his old tutor's son, Pyotr Stepanovitch, his deputy in the Internationale, who from that moment became his apologist, his tool, his agent, and finally the instrument of his destruction. The gratification of Stavrogin's perverted passion, the machinations of the Republicans and nihilists, and the revelations of Shatov's limitations and of Mr. Kirillov's nihilistic idealism are the threads of the story. Shatov was the son of a former valet of Stavrogin's mother who had been expelled from the University after some disturbance, a radical with a tender heart, who had held Stavrogin up as an ideal.
“He was one of those idealistic beings common in Russia who are suddenly struck by some overmastering idea which seems, as it were, to crush them at once and sometimes for ever. They are never equal to coping with it, but put passionate faith in it, and their whole life passes afterward, as it were, in the last agonies under the weight of the stone that has fallen upon them and half crushed them.”
Shatov's overmastering idea was that Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch could do no wrong, and the stone that crushed him was Nikolay's misdeeds. Mr. Kirillov, the engineer, believed that he who conquers pain and terror will become a god.
“Then there will be a new life, a new man, everything will be new ... then they will divide history into two parts: from the gorilla to the annihilation of God, and from the annihilation of God to the transformation of the earth and of man physically. Man will be God and will be transformed physically and all men will kill themselves.”
“He who kills himself only to kill fear will become a god at once.” Kirillov believed or feared that eternal life was now, not hereafter. There are moments when time suddenly stands still for men, and it was fear that it might become eternal that he could not tolerate. In Dostoievsky's books there is always one contemptible character, a sanctimonious hypocrite, a fawning holier-than-thou, a pious scandal monger, a venomous volunteer of first aid to the morally injured. In this book his name is Liputin, an elderly provincial official.
These are the chief figures of the drama.
When Shatov had been killed; when Kirillov's promise: namely, that he would commit suicide on request, had been exacted; when Stavrogin's imbecile wife and her brother Lebyadkin had been despatched; when Lisa, who was abducted by Stavrogin on the eve of her marriage and then abandoned, had been knocked on the head and killed by the mob because she was Stavrogin's woman who “had come to look at the wife he had murdered”; when Shatov's wife had come back to him and borne Stavrogin's child in his presence; when Stepan Trofimovitch had displayed his last infantile reaction and his son Peter, the Russian Mephistopheles, had made a quick and successful get-away, Stavrogin wrote to Darya and suggested that she go with him to the Canton of Uri, of which he was a citizen, and be his nurse. Darya, for whom humiliation spelled happiness, consented and Varvara Petrovna, hearing of the plan, succumbed to the sway of maternal love and arranged to go with them.