In an originally censored chapter (included as "At Tikhon's" in modern editions), Stavrogin himself defines the rule of his life thus: "that I neither know nor feel good and evil and that I have not only lost any sense of it, but that there is neither good nor evil. In any case, his anxiety prompted him to accept Varvara Stavrogina's proposal that he take upon himself "the education and the entire intellectual development of her only son in the capacity of a superior pedagogue and friend, not to mention a generous remuneration. Supporters in the audience rush to his aid as a schoolgirl takes the stage seeking to rouse oppressed students everywhere to protest. Though very conscious of his own erudition, higher ideals and superior aesthetic sensibilities, Stepan Trofimovich doesn't actually seem to do anything at all in the scholarly sense. Pyotr Stepanovich is enamored of Stavrogin, and he tries desperately, through a combination of ensnarement and persuasion, to recruit him to the cause.

According to Frank, Marya represents "Dostoevsky's vision of the primitive religious sensibility of the Russian people", and the false marriage, her rejection of Stavrogin, and her eventual murder, point to the impossibility of a true union between the Christian Russian people and godless Russian Europeanism. For von Lembke, it is the duty of people like him, who are in a position of authority, to encourage the young radicals to condemn everything that is backward in the old Russia, but stop them from going too far.According to Ronald Hingley, it is Dostoevsky's "greatest onslaught on Nihilism", and "one of humanity's most impressive achievements—perhaps even its supreme achievement—in the art of prose fiction. Eventually Stavrogin bursts into laughter: he empties the contents of his wallet in Fedka's face, and walks off. He plunges headlong into a passionate exhortation of his own aesthetic ideals, becoming increasingly shrill as he reacts to the derision emanating from the audience. He arrives as a large group of workers from the Spigulin factory are staging a protest about work and pay conditions.

Dostoevsky considered the chapter to be essential to an understanding of the psychology of Stavrogin, and he tried desperately but unsuccessfully to save it through revisions and concessions to Katkov.The idealistic, Western-influenced intellectuals of the 1840s, epitomized in the character of Stepan Verkhovensky (who is both Pyotr Verkhovensky's father and Nikolai Stavrogin's childhood teacher), are presented as the unconscious progenitors and helpless accomplices of the "demonic" forces that take possession of the town. Pyotr Stepanovich, on his arrival in the town, is quick to take advantage of her resentment towards his father. Likewise, if Tsarist Russia had not been such a backward, intellectually intolerant, priest-ridden, anti-Semitic hellhole, the likes of Lenin would not have a Though dismayed, Stepan Trofimovich accedes to her proposal, which happens to resolve a delicate financial issue for him.