"Enough!
Listen. I've given up the Pope!
Damn Shigalovism!
Damn the Pope!
We must have something more everyday. Not Shigalovism, for Shigalovism is a rare specimen of the jeweller's art.
It's an ideal; it's in the future.
Shigalov is an artist and a fool like every philanthropist.
We need coarse work, and Shigalov despises coarse work.
Listen. The Pope shall be for the west, and you shall be for us, you shall be for us!"
"Let me alone, you drunken fellow!" muttered Stavrogin, and he quickened his pace.
"Stavrogin, you are beautiful," cried Pyotr Stepanovitch, almost ecstatically.
"Do you know that you are beautiful!
What's the most precious thing about you is that you sometimes don't know it.
Oh, I've studied you!
I often watch you on the sly!
There's a lot of simpleheartedness and naivete about you still. Do you know that?
There still is, there is!
You must be suffering and suffering genuinely from that simple-heartedness.
I love beauty.
I am a nihilist, but I love beauty.
Are nihilists incapable of loving beauty?
It's only idols they dislike, but I love an idol.
You are my idol!
You injure no one, and every one hates you. You treat every one as an equal, and yet every one is afraid of you—that's good.
Nobody would slap you on the shoulder.
You are an awful aristocrat.
An aristocrat is irresistible when he goes in for democracy!
To sacrifice life, your own or another's is nothing to you.
You are just the man that's needed.
It's just such a man as you that I need.
I know no one but you.
You are the leader, you are the sun and I am your worm."
He suddenly kissed his hand.
A shiver ran down Stavrogin's spine, and he pulled away his hand in dismay.
They stood still.
"Madman!" whispered Stavrogin.
"Perhaps I am raving; perhaps I am raving," Pyotr Stepanovitch assented, speaking rapidly. "But I've thought of the first step!
Shigalov would never have thought of it.
There are lots of Shigalovs, but only one man, one man in Russia has hit on the first step and knows how to take it.
And I am that man!
Why do you look at me?
I need you, you; without you I am nothing.
Without you I am a fly, a bottled idea; Columbus without America."
Stavrogin stood still and looked intently into his wild eyes.
"Listen. First of all we'll make an upheaval," Verhovensky went on in desperate haste, continually clutching at Stavrogin's left sleeve.
"I've already told you. We shall penetrate to the peasantry.
Do you know that we are tremendously powerful already?
Our party does not consist only of those who commit murder and arson, fire off pistols in the traditional fashion, or bite colonels.
They are only a hindrance.
I don't accept anything without discipline.