The Icon and the Axe

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.