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Crime and Punishment · Part Two

The Inquiry

Money and WealthPrideReasonGuiltCompassion and Charity

Summary of the part

Part One closes with the crime done; this part covers the days in which the body betrays Raskolnikov before the mind decides anything. The net closes by chance and not by method: the painter Nikolai is detained with the old woman's earrings and says he found them on the sidewalk, and Luzhin, his sister's fiancé, states aloud the doctrine of self-interest, a relative of the theory that sustained the crime. The part ends in two directions at once: Raskolnikov gives everything he has to an almost unknown family and feels that life has returned, and on arriving home he finds his mother and sister, whom he was not expecting.

Chapter I: The Body That Knows Before Consciousness

Money and WealthGuilt

Chapter summary

Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov wakes on the sofa, still in his hat and clothes, and remembers everything at once. He checks his clothes for blood, cuts with his penknife the hem of his trousers where the blood has dried, stuffs the old woman's purse and jewels into a hole in the wallpaper, and sees at once that this is not hiding; he finds blood in the lining of his pocket and on his stocking, and what frightens him most is the suspicion that memory and judgment are abandoning him. Nastasya and the porter bring a summons from the police station; certain they have come to arrest him, he understands only after reading the sheet that it is an ordinary summons.

At the police station, he learns that the summons concerns a promissory note for one hundred and fifteen rubles, which the landlady passed on to a titular councillor, and he feels an enormous relief: he answers the lieutenant, Ilya Petrovich, who greets him with shouts, and pours out to Inspector Nikodim Fomich the story of the landlady and her daughter, who died of typhus. The lieutenant cuts him off, and his mood at once turns into a gloomy solitude. He signs the written undertaking to pay and not to leave the city; he feels the impulse to tell the inspector everything, but, hearing him explain that Kokh and Pestryakov, the young man who had gone up with him, will be released because the murderer was inside and escaped, he goes to the door and faints. Questioned afterward, he says he left shortly after seven, is dismissed, and, in the street, runs home certain there will be a search.

Analysis

Все это условно, все относительно, все это одни только формы, all of this is conventional, all of it is relative, all of it is nothing but forms.

Raskolnikov takes off the stocking with disgust and terror, remembers he has no other, and pulls it back on; the laughter that comes to him calls the gesture a mere convention. The thought lasts a corner of his mind, while his whole body trembles, and the laughter soon gives way to despair. Two readings: the irony of a man who sees himself in an absurd situation, or the same devaluing of rules that sustained the crime, now used to endure a stocking.

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Chapter II: Hiding Under the Stone

Money and WealthPrideReason

Chapter summary

At home there was no search at all; no one had touched anything. Even so, he takes the things out of the hole, fills his pockets, and goes out, certain that within half an hour an order to follow him may be issued. He decides to throw them into the canal, as he had resolved during the fever, but he walks for half an hour along the bank of the Ekaterininsky Canal and cannot do it: washerwomen on the rafts, boats, people everywhere, and the jewel cases might float. Only after a long walk does he realize the Neva would be more sensible, and on the way he thinks of burying everything on the islands. It is then that he sees the entrance to a blind courtyard, with rubble, a trough, and a rough stone of about twenty-five kilos set against the wall. He lifts the stone, throws everything into the hole, with the purse on top, and sets the stone back in place. A strong, almost unbearable joy overtakes him, and he laughs a small, silent laugh as he crosses the square.

Analysis

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Chapter III: The Fever Razumikhin Looks After

Compassion and Charity

Chapter summary

In his illness the delirium comes in visions: people who want to carry him away, others who peer at him through the door and laugh, and the anguish of having forgotten something that must not be forgotten. One morning he wakes and sees Nastasya and a young man who has come to deliver thirty-five rubles at the request of Pulcheria Alexandrovna Raskolnikova, his mother. Razumikhin comes in and says he has gone four days hardly eating or drinking, and that the doctor Zossimov has already examined him twice. Raskolnikov refuses to sign the receipt, without explaining why, and in the end signs it on his own.

Razumikhin feeds him with a spoon; he has plenty of strength, but he pretends to be weak so that he can listen and find out what is going on. Razumikhin tells how he went looking for him, how he met the inspector, the clerk Zamyotov and the landlady, and how he stood surety: he paid ten rubles to the councillor who held the note and tore it up. Raskolnikov corrects him: he lied to the landlady about his mother so that they would feed him. He asks what he said in his delirium and hears a list: earrings, chains, and the stocking and the hem of his trousers, which he begged for in tears. When he is alone, he jumps out of bed, searches the hole and the ashes of the stove, certain that everyone already knows and only pretends, and then sleeps for over six hours. At dusk, Razumikhin dresses him in new clothes, and Zossimov comes in.

Analysis

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Chapter IV: The Painter Nikolai and the Logic of Facts

Reason

Chapter summary

Zossimov is a tall, heavy man of studied slowness; he examines Raskolnikov (good pulse, no medicine needed). Razumikhin invites the two of them to the housewarming party that evening and mentions the clerk Zamyotov and Porfiry Petrovich, in charge of the investigation and a distant relative of his. He speaks of the case of the painter Nikolai, whom the police have arrested as a suspect, still annoyed with her. Nastasya blurts out that they have also killed Lizaveta Ivanovna, the one who used to sew shirts for Raskolnikov, and he turns his face to the wall and fixes his eyes on a paper flower.

Razumikhin says that Kokh and Pestryakov were arrested only because the door had been locked and then unlocked. On the third day after the crime, Duchkin, the owner of a tavern across from the building, took to the police a case of gold earrings that the painter Nikolai had pawned to him, saying he had found them on the sidewalk. Nikolai was caught after trying to hang himself and said he had found them behind the door of the apartment where he painted, and Raskolnikov gets to his feet on hearing this. Razumikhin concludes that Nikolai told the truth: ten witnesses saw the two painters rolling at the gate, laughing like children, while the bodies were still warm. Zossimov finds the explanation too ingenious, and a stranger comes in.

Analysis

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Chapter V: The Sister's Fiancé and the Whole Caftan

Money and WealthReason

Chapter summary

Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin enters, about forty-five years old, stiff, dressed anew from head to foot, with lilac gloves in his hand and the air of someone who expects to be seen as a fiancé. He asks for Raskolnikov with ceremonious emphasis, hears from Razumikhin that he is there on the sofa, and when he introduces himself, presuming his name to be known, receives only a vacant look. When he mentions his mother's letter, he hears the sick man cut him short impatiently: "I know, I know! So you're the fiancé? Enough!" He is offended, but carries on. He says he has already reserved rooms for his mother and sister at a boardinghouse in Bakaleyev's building, which Razumikhin describes as filthy and of bad repute, and that he is temporarily living with a young friend, Lebeziatnikov.

Analysis

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Chapter VI: The Question Thrown in Zamyotov's Face

Guilt

Chapter summary

Alone, Raskolnikov fastens the hook, puts on the new clothes, puts the twenty-five rubles in his pocket, and goes out, with a strange calm and the fixed idea that everything must end that day, one way or another. In Sennaya he gives five kopecks to a girl singing to the sound of a barrel organ, asks a young man in a red shirt about the merchant and the woman who had talked with Lizaveta in the square, without finding them, and in an alley of taverns he gives three five-kopeck coins to a streetwalker. He remembers reading about a condemned man who would rather live forever on a palm's breadth of rock than die. In the Crystal Palace tavern he looks through old newspapers for news of the crime.

Zamyotov, who is drinking champagne with colleagues, sits down at his table, and Raskolnikov provokes him: he laughs in his face, calls him "little sparrow," and says the news of the old woman interests him. When Zamyotov comments on the counterfeiters arrested in Moscow, Raskolnikov says he would pass the bills without a tremor, and describes in a whisper how he would hide the loot: an empty lot, a stone by the wall, a hole beneath it, all under it. Zamyotov says he is mad, and Raskolnikov asks what it would be like if he himself had killed the old woman and Lizaveta. Zamyotov turns pale and denies it. Raskolnikov pays more than he owes and, at the door, runs straight into Razumikhin, who invites him to the party; he refuses. On the bridge, he sees a woman jump into the canal and a policeman save her.

He goes to the scene of the crime, climbs to the fourth floor, where workmen are renovating the apartment, and rings the bell three times. He asks about the blood, proposes going to the police station to say who he is, and the porter throws him out. Standing at the crossroads, he sees a crowd around a carriage and goes over there.

Analysis

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Chapter VII: The Death of Marmeladov

Money and WealthGuiltCompassion and CharityRedemption

Chapter summary

The commotion is a carriage that has run over a man. Raskolnikov, seeing the face by the light of a lamp, recognizes him: Semyon Zakharovich Marmeladov. He offers to pay for a doctor and manages to have him carried home, thirty paces away. Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova rushes to her bloodied husband; the tenants crowd the room; the doctor arrives and says he will die in five or ten minutes, and then the priest. Sent for by Katerina, Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova appears at the door dressed like the street girls; Marmeladov sees her, begs forgiveness, and dies in her arms. Katerina asks with what she will bury him; Raskolnikov hands the widow the twenty rubles he has and leaves.

On the stairs he runs into Nikodim Fomich and tells him he is all covered in blood. He goes down with a new sense of life returning. Polenka, Katerina's eldest daughter, catches up with him, sent by Sonia, and asks his name and where he lives, and he asks her to pray for the servant Rodion; she promises to pray all her life. On the bridge he tells himself that there is life, and that it did not die with the old woman. He goes to the Pochinkov house, where Razumikhin is giving the party, says he will not come in, and in the street Razumikhin, half drunk, tells him that Zossimov thinks he is somewhat mad, that the suspicion that he was the murderer hovered over everyone until the painter was arrested, and that Porfiry wants to meet him. When they reach the room they see a light: his mother and sister have been waiting for him for an hour and a half. Pulcheria Alexandrovna Raskolnikova and Avdotya Romanovna Raskolnikova throw themselves upon him, and he, without strength, faints.

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Reading of the Part

Analysis

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