Who She Is
Lizaveta Ivanovna is the younger half-sister of the pawnbroker Alyona Ivanovna, and the second victim of the axe. She hardly speaks and dies in chapter VII of Part One, and yet she weighs on the whole book, for a reason the common reading tends to miss: it is her death that dismantles the theory, not the pawnbroker's. And she reappears outside her own arc, because it is her copper cross that Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova keeps for herself when she places the cypress cross on the chest of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov before he gives himself up, and it was she who brought Sonia the Gospel from which the reading of the resurrection of Lazarus comes.
Trajectory
In chapter VI of Part One she reaches the reader through the student's description in the tavern: poor, exploited by her own sister, meek, always pregnant, and useful to everyone around her.
In chapter VII of Part One she enters the apartment when her sister is already dead. Her gesture when she is struck is the detail the book chooses to keep, and it is neither defense nor flight:
Она только чуть-чуть приподняла свою свободную левую руку, далеко не до лица, и медленно протянула ее к нему вперед, как бы отстраняя его., She only lifted her free left arm a little, far short of her face, and slowly stretched it out toward him, as if pushing him away.
Dead, she returns to the book through her link with Sonia, which the novel does not explain at once. The two were friends and had exchanged crosses, and it was Lizaveta who took to Sonia, at her request, the copy of the Gospel from which the reading of Lazarus's resurrection comes, in chapter IV of Part Four. It is also the passage Sonia once read to Lizaveta, and the one Raskolnikov now asks her to read.
In the confession, in chapter IV of Part Five, Sonia's face gives him back Lizaveta's, the outstretched hand and the child's fright, and when he finally manages to speak of the crime, he speaks of himself as of another:
Лизавету эту… убить не хотел… Он ее… убил нечаянно… Он старуху убить хотел… когда она была одна… и пришел… А тут вошла Лизавета… Он тут… и ее убил, This Lizaveta... he did not want to kill her... He... killed her by accident... He wanted to kill the old woman... when she was alone... and he came... And then Lizaveta came in... He... and he killed her too.
In the same chapter Sonia offers him the cypress cross, the one for ordinary people, and he refuses it, saying it was not the time. In chapter VIII of Part Six, at the moment of surrender, Sonia does what they had agreed, and that is when Lizaveta's cross returns to the book:
Sonia places on Raskolnikov's chest only the cypress cross, the one for ordinary people, and keeps the copper one, which she exchanged with Lizaveta Ivanovna. In Part Five he had refused the cypress cross, saying it would be better later, and she had agreed to give it to him when he went to suffering, so the scene fulfills the agreement; the victim's cross stays with the woman who will accompany him.
Themes Embodied
She is the proof that the calculation does not close. Raskolnikov's argument depends on the victim being a louse, someone whose death only produces benefit, and Lizaveta, as chapter VI of Part One describes her, is the exact opposite of this in every item. She was not part of the calculation.
The gesture of chapter VII of Part One is the instant in which the moral arithmetic breaks within the scene itself, and not later, in the murderer's conscience. A theory that needs a disposable victim produces, in that same minute, a victim that no version of the theory can discard. The chapter already leaves the question open.
The novel links the protagonist's two victims without announcing it: the book through which he will be called back, read in chapter IV of Part Four, came from the hands of the woman he killed by accident.
The exchange of crosses in chapter VIII of Part Six is not plot irony; it is the structure of the punishment: the victim's cross stays with the woman who accompanies him, and the murderer carries the cross of his companion. Anyone who reads the scene of the crosses without knowing this loses half of its weight. The question remains why Dostoevsky leaves the cross of the accidental victim with the woman who accompanies the murderer, and gives him the cypress one, instead of handing him the victim's cross.
Relationships
- Aliena Ivanovna, the half-sister who exploits her, and the target of the plan.
- Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov: he kills her without having foreseen it, and her cross stays with Sonia, who accompanies him at the surrender.
- Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova: the friend, the exchange of crosses, and the Gospel.