nikolai vsevolodovich stavrogin

Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin is the central character of the novel but a highly ambiguous figure and often an observer or secondary participant in the novel's key events compared to the younger Verkhovensky, who drives much of the action and repeatedly attempts to involve Stavrogin in his schemes with limited success. A complex figure, he has many anti-social traits that mark him as a manipulative personality, but he is not ultimately the sociopath he sometimes seems to be in light of the overriding guilt he ultimately succumbs to. In a scene in the first part of the novel this is suggested when he seems ready to be gunned down at a duel without defending himself. His acceptance of his guilt for his multiple sins is also notable in his allowing Shatov, whose wife Stavrogin has had an affair with, to punch him in the face without responding, a seemingly shameful reaction for a nobleman to a former serf (this takes place in perhaps the best scene of a type seen often in Dostoevsky's w…more