One of the most complex deviates is Dostoyevsky’s Nikolay Stavrogin. Although he is capable of heterosexual relationships, he is a pervert who has corrupted a small child and caused her suicide. A sadist, he is also an admitted masochist. In marrying the feeble-minded Marya Lebyadkin he had carried out his idea of “somehow crippling my life in the most repulsive manner possible.” In the long-suppressed chapter of the novel which contains his confession to Bishop Tihon, Stavrogin hears the Bishop tell him: “You are possessed by a desire for martyrdom....” But the “terrible undisguised need of punishment” is emotionally complicated because this compulsion is a “need of the cross in a man who doesn’t believe in the cross--” Stavrogin plays an essentially passive political role since he allows himself to be used by Pyotr. His case represents, however, a combining of abnormalities usually found singly. One aspect of Stavrogin’s character also appears in men who do not deviate from the norm. Nick Burr in _The Voice of the People_ looks like Lincoln in his towering stature and his “good, strong kind of ugliness.” He prepares himself for his martyrdom by opposing powerful forces in his state, and finally meets it by attempting to halt a lynching. To some, this self-sacrifice carries an almost religious ecstasy. In Moravia’s _The Fancy Dress Party_ Saverio has been ordered to assassinate the dictator of the South American country of Bolivar. He thinks that he now knows what the early Christians must have felt, “the sweet, deep pleasure of sacrificing themselves for the greater good of humanity....” Shaw’s Clement Archer and Shirer’s Raymond Whitehead do not enter into their ordeals with the intention of becoming martyrs. When they are deprived of their primary sources of livelihood, however, this is precisely what they become. In most of the novels there is an awareness of the political value of martyrs, and the Communists, particularly, excel in their manufacture.