Avdotya Romanovna Raskolnikova

Who She Is

Avdotya Romanovna Raskolnikova, usually called Dunya and Dunechka by her mother, is the sister of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov. She is indispensable to understanding the work, because her engagement to Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin is what sets the crime in motion, and she reappears outside her own arc as the exact counterpart of Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova. Dunya is not the sister who suffers in silence while her brother thinks. Her axis is decisions: the decision to accept the engagement, the decision to break it before witnesses (chapter II of Part Four), and the decision not to fire a third time at Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov (chapter V of Part Six).

Trajectory

In chapter III of Part One she exists only through her mother's letter. The letter tells of the engagement to Luzhin, accepted after a sleepless night and prayer before the icon, and it also tells what came before it: Dunya's honor destroyed when Marfa Petrovna surprised her in the garden with Svidrigailov, misread everything, struck her, and sent her to her mother's house in a peasant cart, and restored only when Marfa Petrovna herself read aloud, house to house, the letter in which Dunya had repelled him. The truth alone was not enough: it had to be staged.

In chapter IV of Part One she is the engine of the crime, without knowing it. It is there that Raskolnikov turns the theory into urgency, because if his sister is going to sell herself for him, inaction becomes complicity. The novel makes the protagonist act on a calculation she never asked him to make.

In chapter I of Part Three, when her brother orders her to break off the engagement, she asks by what right, the same question he asked himself when he read the letter. She knows exactly what she is doing, and she refuses the vocabulary of sacrifice. It is the first of her public decisions, and the explanation comes out in her own words in chapter III of Part Three, before the mother and his friends:

In chapter II of Part Four comes the break with Luzhin, before witnesses. When he rises to leave, it is she who stops him, and she puts the choice in terms of one or the other, without hesitation and without making a private scene:

And the close, when he warns that if he leaves he will not come back, belongs to her and not to her brother:

In chapter V of Part Six is her most important scene, and the one most underused in the common readings. Cornered by Svidrigailov in an apartment of empty rooms with the door locked, she draws the revolver: the first bullet grazes her temple, the second misses, and then she throws the weapon away. He asks whether she cannot love him, and her answer closes the arc between the two of them:

His suicide comes at dawn the next day, in chapter VI of Part Six.

In chapter I of the Epilogue, the narrator gives her marriage to Dmitry Prokofich Razumikhin the same sober treatment he gives to everything:

Themes Embodied

Dunya decides, and she almost always decides in public. Her refusal to call the engagement a sale is stated before the family (chapter III of Part Three), and her break with Luzhin is made before everyone (chapter II of Part Four).

The sentence in chapter III of Part Three is a condition, not a denial: she does not say that marriage is not a sale, she says she will not marry without being valued. It is the formulation of someone who has already accepted the terms of the exchange and is negotiating her dignity within them, and that is why Raskolnikov reads it as a sale even after hearing it.

The revolver scene (chapter V of Part Six) is the one in the novel in which a wronged woman holds physical power in her hand and, after two shots, chooses not to use it again. It is the exception to the pattern of public decision: here there is no witness at all. Svidrigailov, who spent the whole book without meeting an external limit, backs down before the only limit he recognizes.

It is the slander told in the letter of chapter III of Part One that explains her decisions as a pattern and not as temperament. Dunya learned, before the novel began, that other people's judgment is not undone in private, and she decides, almost always, in front of witnesses. The same mechanism appears in Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova, when she has Raskolnikov kneel and kiss the earth at a crossroads, in chapter IV of Part Five, a gesture the common reading has always treated as religious. In Dunya it appears with no religion at all, which suggests that the novel treats public confession as a form of reparation and not as a sacrament. If Dunya decides in front of witnesses because of the slander that marked her, the question remains of what changes in the reading of her brother, who kisses the earth in a public square (chapter VIII of Part Six) before confessing at the police station.

The marriage to Razumikhin, in chapter I of the Epilogue, is not a reward. It closes the symmetry the book has set up since Part One: she refused the man who was buying her and ended up with someone who has the same poverty as her brother, and did not draw from it the same conclusion. The narrator, however, describes the celebration as sad and quiet, and that rules out a reading of reward.

Divergent Readings

Her refusal to fire again, in chapter V of Part Six, admits two readings, and the scene does not choose between them: mercy from someone who holds the power and lets it go, or the calculation of someone who knows a second bullet would not resolve anything. The question that remains is whether the novel allows the gesture to be read as mercy, or only as calculation.

Relationships

• Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov: he acts for her without asking her. In chapter V of Part Five she seeks him out without knowing of his guilt and offers him her own life; in chapter VII of Part Six, on the eve of his surrender, she says that whoever goes to suffering already washes half of the crime away.
• Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin: the marriage she breaks off, and the doctrine her brother recognizes as his own, without historical disguise, in chapter V of Part Two.
• Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov: the only person before whom he backs down, and the reason for this lies in the revolver scene in chapter V of Part Six.
• Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova: both sacrifice themselves for the family under someone else's suspicion, and both resolve reparation through the same mechanism, one with religion and the other without.
• Dmitry Prokofich Razumikhin: the husband, in chapter I of the Epilogue.