Alexei Nilych Kirilov

[close] lexei Nilych Kirillov is an engineer. He is a thorough nihilist, and has decided his own will is the ultimate reality. He means to commit suicide, and Pyotr Stepanovich means to use his suicide to further his revolutionary purposes. He is a "thoroughgoing madman", driven to such a state by his obsession with the belief that man can only stop living in fear of death when he rejects such fear to such an extent that he is willing to kill himself without any care. A man who can do this becomes the true God in Kirillov's view.
In his study of suicide, The Savage God, Al Alvarez postulates this theory about Kirillov: "Thus Kirillov. . . . kills himself, he says, to show that he is God. But secretly he kills himself because he knows he is not God. Had his ambitions been less, perhaps he would only have attempted the deed or mutilated himself. He conceived of his mortality as a kind of lapse, an error which offended him beyond bearing. So in the end he pulled the trigger in order to shed this mortality like a tatty suit of clothes, but without taking into account that the clothes were, in fact, his own warm body." (1972, pp. 123–24)
Stavrogin, who seems to find most people boring, takes an unusual interest in Kirillov and spends a lot of time talking to him alone in his apartment, more so probably than any other character, to try to understand his ideas. Kirillov appears to spend almost all day in his apartment alone thinking, such that whenever a character needs to talk to him, they can show up at his home and find him there, as in this humorous passage: "Pyotr Stepanovitch went first to Kirillov's. He found him, as usual, alone, and at the moment practicing gymnastics, that is, standing with his legs apart, brandishing his arms above his head in a peculiar way. On the floor lay a ball. The tea stood cold on the table, not cleared since breakfast." Later he states, "I want to put an end to my life, because that's my idea, because I don't want to be afraid of death." Kirillov infers that if one commits suicide, he directly rejects God's existence. Kirillov, as a truly absurd character, is a major subject of deliberation in Camus' philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus.