Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov

Who He Is

Rural landowner, former card cheat, widower of Marfa Petrovna, the woman who redeemed him from debtors' prison (chapter I of Part Four) through a verbal contract of six conditions, in which formal fidelity was traded for freedom in the bedroom (chapter IV of Part Six).

He first enters the novel as news, the employer who harassed Dunya while she was governess in his house (chapter III of Part One), and only afterward as a physical presence, seated beside the sofa of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov at the exact moment the theory of the extraordinary man has just collapsed in the head of the one who wrote it (chapter VI of Part Three).

He carries behind him a series of deaths that the novel never judges in any court: that of his own wife, which he denies having caused (chapter I of Part Four); that of the servant Filipp and that of Resslich's deaf-mute niece, found hanged, which Luzhin attributes to him (chapter II of Part Four); and that of a fourteen-year-old girl who drowned out of shame, who appears to him in a dream on his last night without the text saying who was responsible (chapter VI of Part Six). None of them costs him a night of the moral insomnia that consumes Raskolnikov for six hundred pages.

He ends with a bullet to the temple, at dawn, in front of a sentry to whom he announces that he is going to America (chapter VI of Part Six).

Trajectory

Before he appears by name, he passes as a stranger: he follows Sonia to the door of her building and introduces himself as a neighbor (chapter IV of Part Three). He appears in person at the end of chapter VI of Part Three, and the entrance is staged as the answer that Porfiry's interrogation did not give.

In chapter I of Part Four he holds the first long conversation between the two, and names the kinship himself before Raskolnikov admits it.

It is during the same visit that he sets out the metaphysics that sustains the life he leads: first the ghosts of Marfa Petrovna, who come to discuss trivial matters, then eternity reduced to a dirty room.

In chapter V of Part Five he reveals to Raskolnikov that he heard the whole confession through the wall of Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova's room and, beside Katerina Ivanovna's bed, hands back to him the reasoning of the louse applied to her, without the horror that the author of the thesis still felt when he formulated it.

The arc closes in three movements. First, in chapter V of Part Six, he sums up the theory of the extraordinary man for Dunya, and the summary is a demolition, because he treats it as ordinary intellectual merchandise.

Then comes the siege in the locked apartment, the two revolver shots, and the question he asks after embracing her, with the bullet already having grazed her temple.

Having received the answer, he returns her key and lets her leave. Then comes the last night of chapter VI of Part Six: the money handed to Sonia, the fifteen thousand rubles left to his fiancee, the two dreams about girls, the second in which he shelters a five-year-old child found in the hotel corridor, who suddenly turns to him with a woman's face, and the final gesture.

Themes Embodied

Svidrigailov is the novel's function of proof, and that is why he exists.

Raskolnikov spends the book trying to discover whether a man can live on the other side of the moral barrier. Svidrigailov is already on the other side when he enters the scene, and the answer he gives back is not philosophical, it is biographical: one can live there, one can live there with good humor and good manners, and in the end nothing is left to do with that freedom except spend it on boredom.

Eternity as a bathhouse with spiders (chapter I of Part Four) is the exact formulation of this discovery, and the reason it is frightening is not horror but smallness: whoever recognizes no law above himself does not inherit the infinite, he inherits a dirty room the size of his own appetite.

Suicide (chapter VI of Part Six) is therefore not punishment or repentance, it is the conclusion of an argument. With no God to answer to and no suffering to take on, disposing of one's own life is the last act available to someone who has already disposed of the lives of others, and he carries it out with the same courtesy with which he did everything else.

The gestures of generosity in his last days (the receipts and bonds handed to Sonia in chapter VI of Part Six, the burial of Katerina Ivanovna paid since chapter V of Part Five, the three children placed in institutions, which chapter I of Part Six already presents as done, and the fifteen thousand rubles left to his fiancee) do not soften the character, they harden the thesis. He manages to do good without it changing anything in him, which is the novel's harshest demonstration that an isolated act saves no one: what Svidrigailov lacks is not goodness, it is someone before whom he would have to answer for it.

Divergent Readings

Svidrigailov can be read as the executor of someone else's theory or as someone who never had a theory at all, and the divergence is itself the most useful content.

Joseph Frank uses Svidrigailov as a point of comparison to explain Smerdyakov, and in this reading he is the logical executor of a theory that is not his own, the alter ego who takes to its repugnant extreme what the other only thought.

The text of chapter V of Part Six supports the opposite: that he never had any theory at all, only appetite, and that it is precisely this absence of doctrine that makes suicide inevitable, because no thesis sustains him once the appetite runs out. This is shown by the way he sums up Raskolnikov's theory before Dunya:

The real disagreement is between Frank and the reading of the text itself: for the first, Svidrigailov executes a theory; for the second, he proves that the theory was dispensable from the start. The text favors the second, because the most precise formulation of the doctrine, in his mouth (chapter V of Part Six), comes accompanied by contempt for it, and whoever despises the theory he applies is not carrying it to its logical extreme, he is showing that he never needed it.

Relationships

• Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov: the axis of the relationship, and it is asymmetrical. Svidrigailov recognizes the kinship at the first conversation and says it aloud (chapter I of Part Four); Raskolnikov spends the novel refusing the mirror and accepts it only when he can no longer do anything with the information.
• Avdotya Romanovna (Dunya), Raskolnikov's sister: first the governess he harasses (chapter IV of Part Six), then the woman to whom he offers ten thousand rubles (chapter I of Part Four), and finally the one who shoots at him and receives her key back (chapter V of Part Six). She is the only person before whom he backs down.
• Marfa Petrovna, his wife: the contract that organizes his life (chapter IV of Part Six), the death that frees him, and the ghost that visits him to discuss trivialities (chapter I of Part Four).
• Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova: wall neighbor at the moment of the confession (chapter V of Part Five), and the person to whom he hands the money on his last night, justifying it by the fate he foresees for Raskolnikov (chapter VI of Part Six).
• Dmitry Prokofich Razumikhin: his exact opposite in the novel, and the person to whom he later tells Sonia to entrust the money, which measures how much Razumikhin already was, at that point, the practical manager of the family (chapter VI of Part Six).
• Porfiry Petrovich: both surround Raskolnikov at the same time by opposite methods, one through money and insinuation (chapter I of Part Four), the other through psychology (chapter V of Part Four), and neither one ends up using what he knows.