Writing
Kirillov's Truth
People can accept an axiom at face value, but seldom can they accept all its conclusions. Follow the denial of God and free will to its end, and you arrive at someone like Kirillov.
I had intended to write this on Stepan Trofimovich, a faded intellectual who once shone brilliantly and is now shamefully dependent on patronage, essentially a horse that has run its last race, the town clown. But at the very end of Chapter 3, Kirillov is briefly introduced, and I found him the most intriguing.
People can accept an axiom at face value. Few can accept all its conclusions. If you take the viewpoint Pyotr represents, the denial of God and the denial of free will, and you run it to its brutal end, you arrive at someone like Kirillov.
His logic is absurd. God is the pain of the fear of death; if you overcome that fear, you become God. And by suicide, a particular kind, not from any pain but as a way of overcoming the pain of death, he believes he will achieve ultimate freedom. But then he also says there is everything and nothing beyond. What does it even mean to become God within that logic?
It is absurd, and I cannot find a clear logical contradiction in his line of reasoning. He is almost indifferent to everything around him: Varvara's social scheming, Pyotr's sinister planning, Stepan's idle amusement, Liputin's petty politicking. He is unbothered by any of it. He is completely consumed by the single question: is the game of life worth the candle? He is the novel's first existential nihilist. The harder question is whether his quest to become God, from inside his twisted logic, is an intellectual masquerade, or whether he has completely lost the plot.