“None of my works has given me so much trouble as this one,” he wrote from Dresden to his friend Strakhov in October, 1870. “At the beginning, that is, at the end of last year, I thought the novel _made_ and artificial, and rather scorned it. But later I was overtaken by real enthusiasm. I fell in love with my work of a sudden and made a big effort to get all that I had written into good trim. Then in the summer came a transformation, up started a new, vital character, who insisted on being the hero of the book, the original hero (a most interesting figure, but not worthy to be called a hero) fell into the background. The new one so inspired me that I once more began to go over the whole book afresh.”[110] The new character, to which all his attention is now devoted, is Stavrogin, the strangest perhaps and the most terrifying of Dostoevsky’s creations. Stavrogin reads his own riddle towards the end of the book. It is seldom that a character of Dostoevsky’s fails to give, sooner or later, the key, as it were, to his nature, often in most unexpected fashion, by some words he lets slip all of a sudden. Listen, for instance, to Stavrogin’s account of himself: “I have no ties in Russia--everything is as alien to me there as everywhere. It’s true that I dislike living there more than anywhere, but I can’t hate anything even there! I’ve tried my strength everywhere. You advised me to do this, ‘that I might learn to know myself.’ As long as I was experimenting for myself and for others, it seemed infinite, as it has all my life. Before your eyes I endured a blow from your brother; I acknowledged my marriage in public. But to what to apply my strength, that is what I’ve never seen, and do not see now in spite of all your praises in Switzerland, which I believed in. I am still capable, as I always was, of desiring to do something good, and of feeling pleasure from it; at the same time I desire evil, and feel pleasure from that too.”[111] At our last meeting we shall come back to the first item in this declaration--a very important one in Dostoevsky’s estimation. Stavrogin had no ties in his native land. To-day let us consider only this double-headed hydra of desire that is gnawing Stavrogin. Man ever entreats, says Baudelaire, God and the Devil at one and the same time. At the bottom, what Stavrogin worships is energy. William Blake will give us the key to this baffling character: “_Energy is the only Life--Energy is Eternal Delight._” Aye, hearken further to his proverbs: “_The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom_,” or “_If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise_.”--“_You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough._” Blake’s glorification of energy expresses itself in divers forms. “_The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man._”