I haven't altered anything of your ideas or even of your words, not a syllable."
"I don't agree that you've not altered anything," Stavrogin observed cautiously. "You accepted them with ardour, and in your ardour have transformed them unconsciously.
The very fact that you reduce God to a simple attribute of nationality..."
He suddenly began watching Shatov with intense and peculiar attention, not so much his words as himself.
"I reduce God to the attribute of nationality?" cried Shatov.
"On the contrary, I raise the people to God.
And has it ever been otherwise?
The people is the body of God.
Every people is only a people so long as it has its own god and excludes all other gods on earth irreconcilably; so long as it believes that by its god it will conquer and drive out of the world all other gods.
Such, from the beginning of time, has been the belief of all great nations, all, anyway, who have been specially remarkable, all who have been leaders of humanity.
There is no going against facts.
The Jews lived only to await the coming of the true God and left the world the true God.
The Greeks deified nature and bequeathed the world their religion, that is, philosophy and art.
Rome deified the people in the State, and bequeathed the idea of the State to the nations.
France throughout her long history was only the incarnation and development of the Roman god, and if they have at last flung their Roman god into the abyss and plunged into atheism, which, for the time being, they call socialism, it is solely because socialism is, anyway, healthier than Roman Catholicism.
If a great people does not believe that the truth is only to be found in itself alone (in itself alone and in it exclusively); if it does not believe that it alone is fit and destined to raise up and save all the rest by its truth, it would at once sink into being ethnographical material, and not a great people.
A really great people can never accept a secondary part in the history of Humanity, nor even one of the first, but will have the first part.
A nation which loses this belief ceases to be a nation.
But there is only one truth, and therefore only a single one out of the nations can have the true God, even though other nations may have great gods of their own.
Only one nation is 'god-bearing,' that's the Russian people, and... and... and can you think me such a fool, Stavrogin," he yelled frantically all at once, "that I can't distinguish whether my words at this moment are the rotten old commonplaces that have been ground out in all the Slavophil mills in Moscow, or a perfectly new saying, the last word, the sole word of renewal and resurrection, and... and what do I care for your laughter at this minute!
What do I care that you utterly, utterly fail to understand me, not a word, not a sound!
Oh, how I despise your haughty laughter and your look at this minute!"
He jumped up from his seat; there was positively foam on his lips.
"On the contrary Shatov, on the contrary," Stavrogin began with extraordinary earnestness and self-control, still keeping his seat, "on the contrary, your fervent words have revived many extremely powerful recollections in me.
In your words I recognise my own mood two years ago, and now I will not tell you, as I did just now, that you have exaggerated my ideas.
I believe, indeed, that they were even more exceptional, even more independent, and I assure you for the third time that I should be very glad to confirm all that you've said just now, every syllable of it, but..."
"But you want a hare?"
"Wh-a-t?"
"Your own nasty expression," Shatov laughed spitefully, sitting down again. "To cook your hare you must first catch it, to believe in God you must first have a god. You used to say that in Petersburg, I'm told, like Nozdryov, who tried to catch a hare by his hind legs."
"No, what he did was to boast he'd caught him.
By the way, allow me to trouble you with a question though, for indeed I think I have the right to one now.
Tell me, have you caught your hare?"
"Don't dare to ask me in such words! Ask differently, quite differently." Shatov suddenly began trembling all over.
"Certainly I'll ask differently." Nikolay Vsyevolodovitch looked coldly at him. "I only wanted to know, do you believe in God, yourself?"
"I believe in Russia.... I believe in her orthodoxy.... I believe in the body of Christ.... I believe that the new advent will take place in Russia.... I believe..." Shatov muttered frantically.
"And in God?
In God?"
"I... I will believe in God."
Not one muscle moved in Stavrogin's face.
Shatov looked passionately and defiantly at him, as though he would have scorched him with his eyes.
"I haven't told you that I don't believe," he cried at last. "I will only have you know that I am a luckless, tedious book, and nothing more so far, so far.... But confound me!
We're discussing you not me.... I'm a man of no talent, and can only give my blood, nothing more, like every man without talent; never mind my blood either!
I'm talking about you. I've been waiting here two years for you.... Here I've been dancing about in my nakedness before you for the last half-hour.
You, only you can raise that flag!..."
He broke off, and sat as though in despair, with his elbows on the table and his head in his hands.
"I merely mention it as something queer," Stavrogin interrupted suddenly. "Every one for some inexplicable reason keeps foisting a flag upon me.
Pyotr Verhovensky, too, is convinced that I might 'raise his flag,' that's how his words were repeated to me, anyway.
He has taken it into his head that I'm capable of playing the part of Stenka Razin for them, 'from my extraordinary aptitude for crime,' his saying too."
"What?" cried Shatov, "'from your extraordinary aptitude for crime'?"
"Just so."