Varvara Petrovna in The Possessed

[Sublime99]

I am currently re-reading The Possessed and have to say that more and more, I'm noticing Varvara Petrovna's actions.  It is clear that she definitely believes her son is losing it and that her constant seeking of advice regarding him shwos that she clearly believes that something is awry.  To me, this brings up an interesting dilemma.  Is she truly desiring to help him or is she one of the more "enabling" sort?  I'm not certain which side she is on this equation, but I will definitely be thinking about this as I continue to read.  There is a ton of information about the lead characters and where they fit in regards to nihilism, slavophile tradition, and morality, but very little about Varvara and what tradition she would represent, or what psychological conflict she best emobodies.  More later, but feel free to add to this if you so desire.

[carnage_complex]

    I think that she was an uninvolved mother during most of Nikolai's formative years, and in that sense was probably a rather typical woman of the gentry.  He was educated by Stepan, whose own lack of conviction obviously fostered a lot of Stavrogin's early self-doubt.  He was a kind of surrogate father figure.  We know from Pyotr's relative influence on her that she is very impressionable at times, and Stavrogin probably discovered early on that she could be manipulated without much difficulty.  To be honest, the very first time that I read "Demons," I thought that Dostoevsky might have been alluding to something even more perturbing in the Stepan/Nikolai relationship, something which would have made the scene recounted by Nikolai in the censored chapter "At Tikhon's" look like a tea party.  The 'nighttime visits' and Stepan's later musings of his own guilt led me to believe that perhaps something untoward happened between them...sodomy, etc.  That would have made sense given the idea of moral symmetry that Dostoevsky attempted to reinforce throughout the novel.  Stavrogin ultimately dies as a self perceived source of negation, beyond all possibility of redemption...whereas perhaps Stepan discovered absolution through Orthodoxy.  He did really and truly strike me as a closeted homosexual.  Of course, this would have also explained Stavrogin's own pederasty and deviance later in life.