student who is marked for assassination because he has abandoned the tenets of leftist radicalism. Kirilov is the only character in the film who actually takes his name from a character in Dostoyevsky's novel; in The Possessed, Kirillov is a suicidal Russian engineer who has been driven to nihilism and insanity by the failure of his philosophical quest. True to his literary namesake, Godard's Kirilov also descends into madness and ultimately commits suicide. When Guillaume complains that he cannot listen to music and work at the same time, Véronique uses a facetious declaration of "unlove" to teach him (and the audience) the Maoist lesson of "struggle on two fronts". Véronique then leaves the apartment alone and sets off for a mission to kill the Minister of Culture of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Sholokhov, during his official diplomatic visit to France. On the train ride en route to the planned assassination, Véronique engages in a discussion with the political philosopher, Francis Jeanson (Jeanson was actually Anne Wiazemsky's philosophy professor at the Paris X University Nanterre during 1966–67; a few years earlier, he had once been a communist and the head of a network which supported the Algerian national liberation movement. This led to his highly publicized arrest and trial by the French government in September 1960.) In the scene on the train, Jeanson argues against the use of violence as a means to shut down the French universities. However this does not dissuade Véronique (for her dialogue in this scene, Godard fed Anne Wiazemsky her lines through an earpiece). The appearance of Francis Jeanson in the film seems to correspond to the character of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky (Pyotr's father and Stavrogin's surrogate father) in The Possessed. Indeed, much like Stepan Trofimovich, Jeanson is an intellectual and philosopher who serves as a kind of father-figure/mentor to Véronique — and his early example as a supporter of terrorism makes him responsible for influencing much of the destruction which is to follow. Eventually the train arrives at its destination, and Véronique sets off to the hotel where the Soviet Minister of Culture is staying. She at first mistakenly reverses the digits of the room number and ends up killing the wrong man, then returns and carries out the assassination upon realizing her mistake. The return of the original owners of the apartment where the cell has been living causes them to leave. The revolutionary