Stavrogin's Motivation: Love and Suicide

Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch Stavrogin, the central character of The Possessed, is probably the most mysterious and enigmatic character in Dostoevsky's entire fiction. He says little, he acts little, and we rarely receive a glimpse behind his cold, listless, indifferent mask. He is like a once luminous Sun, the last fires of which have long since been extinguished.

Near the end of Part II a most extraordinary scene transpires. A number of the main characters in the novel are gathered in the drawing room of Stavrogin's mother. Shatov, a friend of Stavrogin's and a former serf of the Stavrogin family, has been sulking in the corner. Everyone has been talking and watching Stavrogin. Suddenly Shatov gets up from his corner, walks across the room and stops, facing Stavrogin. Without warning Shatov strikes Stavrogin a smashing blow to the face with his big heavy fist. Stavrogin staggers violently. Let me quote from the novel:

He had scarcely regained his balance after being almost knocked over in this humilating way, and the horrible, as it were, sodden, thud of the blow in the face had scarcely died away in the room when he seized Shatov by the shoulders with both hands, but at once, almost at the same instant, pulled both hands away and clasped them behind his back. He did not speak, but looked at Shatov, and turned as white as his shirt. But, strange to say, the light in his eyes seemed to die out. Ten seconds later his eyes looked cold, and I'm not lying—calm. Only he was terribly pale. Of course, I don't know what was passing within the man, I saw only his exterior. It seems to me that if a man should snatch up a bar of red-hot iron and hold it tight in his hand to test his fortitude, and after struggling for ten seconds with insufferable pain end by overcoming it, such a man would, I fancy, go through something like what Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch was enduring during those ten seconds (Dostoevsky, p. 207).