He is aware of a lack in himself, which is why he turns to Stavrogin. The nucleus needs a center, and he himself cannot be that, for he is not within but without—a manipulator and strategist. The Byronic figure of the young nobleman appeals to him. His remarkable mask-like beauty, as of Death-in-Life, almost casts him for the central role in Pyotr Stepanovich’s Apocalypse. Or, to put it in more practical terms, from what Pyotr has heard of his exploits in the town, he perceives that he can find a use for him: Stavrogin may be able to supply the charisma that is wanting, the seductive spark of the inhuman. Pyotr himself is inhuman enough, but on a lower level of being, as he knows. He is infernal but cold, sharp, precise, business-like. The very fact that he is greedy to make use of Stavrogin, once the possibility has occurred to him, is typical of the economics of his mind. “You will be the leader, I will be your secretary,” he tells him at one point, showing as concise a grasp as Stalin’s of where the levers of power in revolutionary politics lie. And later, in great excitement: “You are the leader, you are the sun and I am your worm.” It is no shock to see him fawning, but his excited state would be quite out of character if he were not carried away by the vision of what he can do with Stavrogin.
Verhovensky can find a use for everything, not just the enigmatic vagaries of Stavrogin, but every failing, every tic in the community. These are handles he can coolly pull to initiate action, and the ideas of the quintet, which resemble tics, are among the handles he has practiced with. There is the theory of Shigalov, a man with long ears like a donkey’s and a philosophy of despair to match: his final gloomy solution of the social question is “the division of mankind into two unequal parts. One-tenth enjoys absolute liberty and unbounded power over the other nine-tenths.” There is the thought of the miserly Liputin, a domestic despot and Fourierist who believes in the “social harmony” and gloats at night over visions of a future phalanstery: he has come to the conclusion that, as the necessary massacre of 100 million persons would take no less than thirty to fifty years to achieve, maybe emigration is the answer.
Those two are adherents of Verhovensky’s quintet, but he has many other instruments in the town, sometimes unknown to themselves, for example, the provincial governor’s wife, Yulia Mihailovna, who has become so enamored of the new ideas she imbibes from him that she has virtually converted her salon into a revolutionary cell, arousing jealousy in the other ladies. There is Kirillov, a disciple of Feuerbach and believer in a new man-god, who has resolved to commit suicide in order to free other men from the superstitious fear of death. This could not suit Pyotr’s hand better, since Kirillov gladly agrees to donate his suicide to the cause, leaving the time of it to Pyotr to fix. It will be timed just right to cover the murder of the brooding Slavophil Shatov, who has broken with the “Society” and whose execution as a spy has been voted by the quintet.
Fedka, the convict, no social idealist, is another of Pyotr’s agents. His need of a passport enrolls him initially, and a gift of money assures his following through. With Stavrogin’s tacit consent, he will murder a drunkard posing as an army captain, who has got tired of distributing leaflets for the cause, and the fellow’s demented crippled sister, whom Stavrogin has secretly married. Even before this, Fedka will undertake another commission, to rob and desecrate an especially venerated icon, along with a confederate—no ordinary criminal but a quintet member—who will commit the ultimate blasphemy of placing a live mouse in it. Coming on top of other indignities, this outrage leads to the district governor’s having a nervous breakdown and leaving town for Switzerland. But before his nervous illness is recognized and he is deprived of his functions, this mild bureaucrat has had some striking factory-workers flogged—an error the town will pay dear for.
The fever of organization is such that there is no act that does not lead to something else. Sometimes the hand of Verhovensky is discernible; sometimes not. The vanity of the writer Karmazinov leads him to pronounce an absurd farewell to his public entitled “Merci” at the benefit fête for the governesses of the province, and this oration is a contributing cause of the general disorderly uproar that evening, which leads to fires being set. We know that Pyotr did not suggest the topic of the oration—indeed, having been shown the text, he remembers the title as “Bonjour.” Yet we feel that he was somehow behind the governesses’ fête—did he slyly urge the charitable idea on Yulia Mihailovna?—behind the invitation to Karmazinov, who has already demonstrated what a fool he will be on the platform by his excited, approving interest in the manifestoes that are circulating through the town. And who was the guiding spirit in the benefit committee’s decision—catastrophic—not to serve a buffet lunch and champagne to ticket-holders?