Dmitry Prokofich Razumikhin

Who He Is

Dmitry Prokofich Razumikhin, a former university classmate of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, a former student like him and as poor as him: tall, badly shaved, strong, capable of drinking all night or of drinking nothing, of spending a winter without heating his room and of finding it funny.

He is a relative of Porfiry Petrovich, and it is through this social door that the inquiry enters Raskolnikov's life before it enters by way of the police.

He nurses Raskolnikov through four days of fever, takes on the mother and sister at the very moment he abandons them, gathers on his own the evidence that softens the sentence at trial, and marries Dunya at the close of the book.

He is the only completely sane character in the novel, and this sanity is not a trait of temperament but a piece of architecture: he is the control variable of the experiment the book sets up.

Trajectory

In chapter IV of Part One he does not enter the scene, he enters as an idea: Raskolnikov thinks of seeking him out for work and for company, and at this point the narrator stops the narrative and describes him, establishing at the outset the comparison the rest of the book will press:

In chapter V of Part One the idea of seeking him out frightens Raskolnikov, who puts it off in his mind until after all that.

In chapter II of Part Two he receives at home the sick friend, who says he has come to ask for help, contradicts himself in the same speech, and leaves without accepting the translation work and the three rubles he offers.

In chapter III of Part Two he installs himself as a nurse during the fever, feeds the sick man with a spoon, pays off the debt to the landlady, and buys new clothes with Raskolnikov's mother's money. In chapter IV of Part Two, defending the painter Nikolai against the material evidence, he formulates the principle that Porfiry Petrovich will later carry out with professional precision:

In Part Three he appears in three registers within the space of six chapters. Drunk, on the night of the reunion, he takes on Pulcheria Alexandrovna Raskolnikova and Avdotya Romanovna Raskolnikova, and in chapter I of Part Three he gives the defense of the lie that also defines him:

Sober the next morning, he is ashamed of a minor gesture of vanity and decides not to shave, so it won't look as if he dressed up for her, in chapter II of Part Three. And in Porfiry's house, in chapter V of Part Three, against the socialist thesis of crime as protest against the environment:

He accuses the doctrine of suppressing living nature in the name of a closed system:

In the same chapter, and without knowing of the crime, he is the one who names the gravity of Raskolnikov's article after everyone has been discussing it around him:

And it is to him that Porfiry grants the only point he concedes without irony in the whole scene:

On the way back, in chapter VI of Part Three, he tries to dispel Raskolnikov's suspicions, although he himself finds Porfiry's and Zamyotov's tone strange.

In chapter III of Part Four, once the break with Luzhin is over, Razumikhin lays out the plan for a publishing firm, with a thousand rubles from his uncle and another thousand taken from Dunya's three thousand, and offers the mother and sister an apartment in the same house. Then comes the scene in the hallway: Raskolnikov breaks with the family, the two look at each other in silence beside a lamp, and something passes between them without being said, and the request Raskolnikov makes is not silence but substitution:

In Part Five he disappears from the main scene, and the absence is significant: the whole part takes place between Luzhin, Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova, Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova, and Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov, and Razumikhin has no place in a sequence made of traps, delirium, and listening through the wall. He is present only by mention, in chapter V of Part Five, where Dunya mentions him and Raskolnikov recommends him to her as a good, hardworking, and honest man.

In chapter I of Part Six he reappears irritated, to find out once and for all whether Raskolnikov is mad, and brings news of the mother's illness and of the painter's confession. He hears from his friend that the two women will now depend on him:

He reads the gesture as a sign of political conspiracy and not of guilt, and it is this mistake that keeps him outside the secret; when he leaves it, Raskolnikov runs into Porfiry at the door. In chapter VI of Part Six, Svidrigailov, when handing the money to Sonia, suggests she later entrust it to Razumikhin, which measures how much he already is, for everyone, the practical authority of the family.

In chapter I of the Epilogue he does alone what no thesis ever did: he digs up the proof that Raskolnikov had supported a tubercular classmate and saved two children from a fire, takes the mother out of Petersburg, arranges with Dunya the story of a private and distant mission that spares the mother the truth, returns to classes to finish his degree, and marries:

Themes Embodied

Razumikhin's function in the architecture of the novel is to be the control variable, and this is why Dostoevsky gives him exactly the same starting data as the protagonist: the same poverty, the same university abandoned for lack of money, the same city, the same intelligence, and none of the same conclusions. Without him, the theory of the extraordinary man could be read as a consequence of Petersburg's misery, and that is precisely the reading the court of chapter I of the Epilogue adopts. With him on stage from Part One, misery no longer explains the crime, because the same misery produced, in the same city, a man capable of living on a roof without being broken.

The second service he performs for the book is to state Porfiry's method before Porfiry does, and to state it in the tone of table talk, defending an innocent man. This disarms in advance the reading that psychology is a police weapon: when the examining magistrate applies it against Raskolnikov, the reader has already seen it serve acquittal, and this symmetry is what Porfiry comes to admit in chapter II of Part Six, when he says psychology cuts both ways. The novel does not place the method in the mouth of the professional first, because it does not want it to be a professional method.

The third axis is the harshest, and the book carries it out without comment: Razumikhin sustains Raskolnikov's family at the very point where Raskolnikov abandons it, and he does so with what the theory despised, translation work, borrowed money, physical presence, patience with an old woman who is slowly going mad. The crime had as its intimate motive the saving of Dunya from the marriage to Luzhin, and the one who saves her is the classmate who never needed a theory to do it, marrying her in a sad and quiet wedding, with years of economic planning ahead and no memorable line. The refutation of the doctrine is not the Siberian penal camp, it is this scene without drama.

His sanity has a narrative price, and Dostoevsky pays it on purpose: Razumikhin has no arc. He ends the book as what he already was on the page where he was described, and he is the only figure in the novel of whom this can be said. In a book whose subject is consciousness transforming under pressure, the character who does not transform exists to give measure to the others, and that is why he carries so much argument without ever being the subject.

Divergent Readings

The chapter IV of Part Two leaves two readings open for the defense he makes of the painter: dramatic irony from the narrator, who has him describe, without knowing it, the method that threatens the silent man on the sofa, or a foreshadowing of Porfiry, whom he already respects. The question that remains, and is not resolved in any later chapter, is why the same kind of argument does not protect Raskolnikov when the suspect is himself: one answer makes the method a valid instrument that Raskolnikov cannot use because he is guilty; the other makes it an instrument indifferent to guilt, which Zossimov already suspects at once, finding the subtle explanation too neat, too well fitted to be true.

The chapter II of Part Three shows him as an involuntary foil, someone who punishes himself for a minimal gesture of vanity hours before the other man defends the right to trample whole lives. This reading has against it the fact that the gravest objection in the whole scene of chapter V is formulated by him and not by Porfiry, which is hardly involuntary; and it has in its favor that he never realizes what he said, and in chapter VI he tries to dispel his friend's suspicions instead of reading them in his own words.

Razumikhin falls outside some of the novel's reading keys, and that is informative. Joseph Frank organizes the book around the architecture of motives of a man who does not know why he killed, and in this key Razumikhin has no function, because he has no obscure motive at all.

Relationships

• Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov: classmate and nurse during the fever, and the standard against which the protagonist is measured, because he starts from the same data and arrives somewhere else.
• Porfiry Petrovich: relative, the social entry point of the inquiry, and the first to formulate the method the other practices with no evidence at all.
• Avdotya Romanovna Raskolnikova, Dunya, Raskolnikov's sister: whom he is ashamed to desire in chapter II of Part Three, and whom he marries at the close of the book, closing by domestic means what the crime was meant to resolve by means of an axe.
• Pulcheria Alexandrovna Raskolnikova, the mother: who treats him as the family's providence even before her son abandons her, and to whom he brings the news that exalts her in the last months of her disturbed reason.
• Zossimov, the doctor: brought in by him to treat his friend, and the first to voice doubts about the psychological argument he had just built.
• Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova: the correspondent in Siberia, who writes to him every month, addressing the letters to him and through whom all the information about the Siberian prison passes.