receives a disturbing letter from Nikolai Vsevolodovich, which she shows to Varvara Petrovna. News arrives from Skvoreshniki that Nikolai Vsevolodovich is there and has locked himself away without saying a word to anyone. They hurry over, and find that Nikolai Vsevolodovich has hanged himself. Censored chapter The editor of The Russian Messenger, Mikhail Katkov, refused to publish the chapter "At Tikhon's". The chapter concerns Stavrogin's visit to the monk Tikhon at the local monastery, during which he confesses, in the form of a lengthy and detailed written document, to taking sexual advantage of a downtrodden and vulnerable 11-year-old girl—Matryosha—and then waiting and listening as she goes through the process of hanging herself. He describes his marriage to Marya Lebyadkina as a deliberate attempt to cripple his own life, largely as a consequence of his inability to forget this episode and the fear he experienced in its aftermath. 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. He was eventually forced to drop it and rewrite parts of the novel that dealt with its subject matter. He never included the chapter in subsequent publications of the novel, but it is generally included in modern editions as an appendix. It has also been published separately, translated from Russian to English by S.S. Koteliansky and Virginia Woolf, with an essay on Dostoevsky by Sigmund Freud. Themes Atheism and belief Dostoevsky wrote to Maykov that the chief theme of his novel was "the very one over which, consciously and unconsciously, I have been tormented all my life: it is the existence of God." Much of the plot develops out of the tension between belief and non-belief, and the words and actions of most of the characters seem to be intimately bound to the position they take up within this struggle. Dostoevsky saw atheism as the root cause of Russia's deepening social problems. He further wrote to Maykov: "a man who loses his people and his national roots also loses the faith of his fathers and his God." It is in this letter that he speaks, referring primarily to Stavrogin and secondarily to Stepan Verkhovensky, of the 'Russian Man' as comparable to the man possessed by demons who is healed by Jesus in the parable of the swine. In Demons the Russian man has