Word: stavrogin
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...named Nechaev, who seems to live from child prostitution and who may have been Pavel's killer. Later, back in Pavel's rooming house, where he is staying, sleeping in Pavel's bed, wearing his stepson's unwashed clothes, Dostoyevsky begins to sketch the character who will be Nikolai Stavrogin, the world-hating, self-loathing young aristocrat who drives the action in Demons...
This pilgrim's progress of a beatnik Stavrogin is a serious and successful moral essay. Burgess argues quite simply that Alex is more of a man as an evil man than as a good zombie. The clockwork of a mechanical society can never counterfeit the organic vitality of moral choice. Goodness is nothing if evil is not accepted as a possibility...
...toward chaos, Camus uses an onstage narrator who streamlines the transition between scenes (some take only eight seconds). The play roils with the deluded intrigues of nihilists, whom Camus makes strongly reminiscent of modern Marxists. Perhaps the play's chief quality is Camus' adroit emphasis of Nikolay Stavrogin (ably played by Pierre Vaneck), the book's most memorably monstrous character. An empty-souled aristocrat, Stavrogin longs to be a sort of Nietzschean superman. He instigates a band of young revolutionaries to murder, rapes his landlady's little daughter, finally commits suicide. In the hands of Camus...
Silence in the Street. Some critics will reach for their nearest Dostoevsky, but Nabokov himself disdains comparison with the other Russian, whom he regards as a clumsy and vulgar writer. Yet, the suppressed criminal episode in Dostoevsky's' The Possessed invites analogy with Lolita. Stavrogin, Dostoevsky's moral monster, seduced an innocent. The difference is that Stavrogin told of his crime to prove he was capable of it; Nabokov's character tells his agonized story to show that he was incapable of not committing it. In Nabokov's world, crime is its own punishment...
...Michael Chekhov, nephew of famed Playwright Anton Chekhov, offered a dramatization of Dostoevsky's The Possessed. Probably the worst of all attempts to put Dostoevsky on the stage, it reduced the vast forest of his imagination to dead, sapless stumps. One grotesque, blighted scene followed another. The hero Stavrogin-one of the most astounding characters in fiction-became any confused young intellectual seeking an answer to life. The answer itself was pared down to a kind of Dos-toevsky-for-Tots...
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