Rebels, Dostoevsky

 Rebel - one who recognises existence of an authority and rebels against it. I suppose this could be divided into those who consider this authority legitimate but who rebel anyway. Here might is right, the possession of power is its legitimacy. You could even include teenage rebellion as within this - the stirrings of individuality need to rise up, however seriously against the world of adult authority, before later submitting or joining the same world.

The other type, who would be more under the banner of idealism, considers the authority illegitimate, and it is his forced duty to rebel and defy it. The demarcations obviously between these two groups may not be so clear cut, which isn’t to belittle or besmirch the idealism and the situation that provokes it.

Then there is another figure for whom this authority means so little, he  doesn’t feel the instinct to  rebel. His rebellion is in the eyes of the authority, not of himself, and for the world of authority and hierarchies of power he is the more guilty since they feel how little they mean to him. If he was kicking against them, they would be more or less on the same energetic plane. This in an inner sense is a very advanced being but that’s not to say he is necessarily better. He may have precious little lust for power over others, but that can easily become indifference  and unfeeling and disengagement from the world in a negative sense.

In Dostoevsky’s novel Demons, the devious and amoral revolutionary figure of Pyotr Verkhovensky is a mixture of the first two types above - greedy for power in itself but also full of a warped idealism. Idealism can be extremely warped! Feeling passionately about something isn’t enough to make it a good something. Nikolai Stavrogin, the true central figure of the novel, is an extreme instance of the third type. He is a ‘higher being’, though his inability to find a natural place in the world has led him into extremes of wasteful, sometimes cruel behaviour and even dreadful depravity, not even out of a love of debauchery but almost from indifference - that the extremes at least feel more real and give the sense of more intense engagement with the world in those moments. However, ultimately this is a terrible dead-end for him, and also particularly one awful incident (which the publishers wouldn’t allow Dostoevsky include, and thus significantly hurt the balance of the book) has haunted his conscience to the point where he needs to either  somehow find salvation from his guilt or else know himself damned. (Modern editions of Demons generally include the omitted chapters at the end, and I think anyone reading the novel now should read them where Dostoevsky intended them to be. It makes far more sense of Stavrogin’s character and inner situation.)

But anyway - after digressing far more than I wished! - Verkhovensky, for all his vanity and revolutionary zeal, knows himself ultimately a mediocrity in the spirit, he does not possess that which will irresistibly inspire people simply through his very person - though in the more perceptive loathing may ensue. Stavrogin though, the third type of rebel, is to an extreme this higher being, even amidst the chaos of his life, his indifference to the world somehow includes in itself a huge magnetic draw from the world. As described at the start of this, Verkhovensky is of the world and simply inspires feelings in sync with that world; whereas Stavrogin, not of and higher than it, evokes passions of aversion or adoration. And so Verkhovensky’s great dream is that Stavrogin will lead, or agree to step into place at the  right time as the leading figure of his revolutionary movement. Largely through indifference Stavrogin half goes along with this thought - though again as much because it means so little to him he doesn’t bother rebelling against it - but ultimately this indifference, and the lack of attraction that world has for him, mean it barely exists for him as an active temptation.

So that went way beyond the brief few lines I’d intended …