Who He Is
Examining magistrate in charge of the case of the murdered pawnbroker, and a relative of Razumikhin (chapter IV of Part Two), which places him within the life of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov by way of society before placing him by way of the police.
Single, sickly, talkative, with a manner of speech that dissolves into digressions about his own apartment and his own hemorrhoids, and which his adversary takes a long time to recognize as method (chapter V of Part Four).
He never gathers a single piece of material evidence against Raskolnikov, and says so to his face more than once (chapter V of Part Four, chapter II of Part Six).
He never arrests him either: what he does, from the first meeting to the last, is offer the suspect the mirror in which he surrenders on his own.
Trajectory
The method appears in the novel before the man does. Still in chapter IV of Part Two, defending the painter Nikolai, Dmitry Prokofich Razumikhin states, in the tone of table talk, the principle that Porfiry will carry out with professional precision.
По одним психологическим только данным можно показать, как на истинный след попадать должно. «У нас есть, дескать, факты!» Да ведь факты не все; по крайней мере, половина дела в том, как с фактами обращаться умеешь!, Psychological data alone are enough to show how one ought to arrive at the true trail. "We have facts, they say!" But facts are not everything; at least half the business lies in knowing how to handle the facts!
In chapter V of Part Three the first meeting takes place, and it begins on the ground where the suspect is vain: the article written half a year earlier. Porfiry summarizes it in a simplified and aggressive version, calculated to force a correction.
Все дело в том, что в ихней статье все люди как-то разделяются на «обыкновенных» и «необыкновенных». Обыкновенные должны жить в послушании и не имеют права переступать закона, потому что они, видите ли, обыкновенные. А необыкновенные имеют право делать всякие преступления и всячески преступать закон, собственно потому, что они необыкновенные., The whole thing is that in their article people are somehow divided into "ordinary" and "extraordinary." The ordinary must live in obedience and have no right to transgress the law, because, you see, they are ordinary. The extraordinary, on the other hand, have the right to commit all sorts of crimes and to transgress the law in every way, precisely because they are extraordinary.
Raskolnikov corrects, refines, and sets out the whole doctrine, which is exactly what was wanted from him. When Razumikhin, who knows nothing of the crime, bluntly names the gravity of the thesis, Porfiry immediately confirms it.
Совершенно справедливо, страшнее-с, Perfectly right, it is more terrible, sir.
In chapter V of Part Four he describes his own method as if it were the general theory of the trade, and Raskolnikov understands the lesson as directed at him.
Видали бабочку перед свечкой? Ну, так вот он все будет, все будет около меня, как около свечки, кружиться [...] все суживая да суживая радиус, и — хлоп! Прямо мне в рот и влетит, Have you seen a moth in front of a candle? Well, that's how he will be, he'll keep circling around me, the way one circles a candle [...] narrowing and narrowing the radius, and, bam! He'll fly right into my mouth.
The siege falls apart in chapter VI of Part Four, with Nikolai's false confession, and Raskolnikov leaves understanding, for the first time, that his adversary's weapon cuts both ways.
Все о двух концах, теперь все о двух концах, Everything cuts both ways, now everything cuts both ways.
In chapter II of Part Six he goes to Raskolnikov's home for a visit he calls an explanation. He reconstructs the psychological trap and acknowledges, without being pressed, the constitutive defect of his own weapon, and this confession explains why he needs the voluntary surrender.
ведь в том-то и штука, что вся эта проклятая психология о двух концах!, for that's the catch: all this cursed psychology cuts both ways!
Then he sets Nikolai aside and says what he had never said plainly:
Как кто убил?.. — переговорил он, точно не веря ушам своим, — да вы убили, Родион Романыч! Вы и убили-с…, What do you mean, who killed?... he said, as if not trusting his own ears, why, you killed him, Rodion Romanych! You're the one who killed, sir...
Without evidence and without an arrest, all he can do is offer a way out, and he offers it from a lowered position, stripping himself of any moral authority over the other man.
Кто я? Я поконченный человек, больше ничего., Who am I? I am a finished man, nothing more.
не смейтесь над этим, в страдании есть идея. Миколка-то прав., Don't laugh at this, there is an idea in suffering. Mikolka is right.
Themes Embodied
Porfiry is the adversary the novel needed so that it would not become a detective story, and his function in the architecture of the book is negative: he exists so that the outcome cannot be credited to the investigation.
An inquiry that produced proof would make Crime and Punishment the story of a man caught, and the book's question would no longer be answered, because the question was never who killed or whether he would be caught. It was what decides a man to act.
That is why the examining magistrate always arrives with empty hands, and why he is the one who states Raskolnikov's theory in the scene, before Raskolnikov himself sets it out (chapter V of Part Three). His task is not to gather clues. It is to force the suspect to hear his own doctrine spoken aloud by another mouth.
The weapon is ambivalent by construction, and the book makes a point of saying so in plain terms: first through Raskolnikov's mouth, who discovers he can turn every accusation into a defense (chapter VI of Part Four), and then through Porfiry's own, when he admits that psychology cuts both ways (chapter II of Part Six).
Nikolai's false confession (chapter VI of Part Four) is the practical demonstration: the same method that sees the culprit behind the fact also absolves the innocent man who accuses himself, and nothing within the method distinguishes one case from the other.
What closes the siege is not psychology but the proposal that comes after it. Porfiry stops investigating and begins to offer suffering as a path, exactly what Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova had already proposed on religious grounds (chapter IV of Part Five), and he does so from a place without authority, declaring himself a finished man (chapter II of Part Six). It is the adversary giving up his procedural victory so that the surrender will count.
The ambivalence of the weapon is not a defect of the character. It is the thesis of the book applied to the plot itself: if psychological data were enough to convict, consciousness would be readable from outside, and that is exactly what the novel spends six hundred pages denying. Porfiry fails as an investigator for the same reason Raskolnikov fails as an extraordinary man: neither of them can reduce a person to a system that predicts them.
Divergent Readings
The chapter VI of Part Four leaves the question open without taking sides: does Nikolai's confession prove that the method works (only Porfiry was not fooled), or that it can be fooled by anyone willing to confess? Both answers are sustainable from the text, and the second is the one Porfiry himself adopts when he speaks of the two edges (chapter II of Part Six).
Joseph Frank shifts the weight away from the inquiry: he reads the novel as the search for a motivation that the criminal makes for himself, not one the police make for him, which reduces Porfiry to an instrument of that search. It is a reading compatible with the duel the chapters allow, but with the emphasis inverted, because Frank is interested in the architecture of motives and the scene is interested in the duel.
Porfiry is not a piece of the outcome, he is a piece of the construction: in a strictly religious reading the examining magistrate would be dispensable, and that confirms, by another route, that the outcome does not owe anything to the investigation.
Relationships
- Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov: adversary and, in the end, counselor. The duel has three rounds, the article (chapter V of Part Three), the siege (chapter V of Part Four), and the explanation (chapter II of Part Six), and none of them produces proof.
- Dmitry Prokofich Razumikhin: a relative of Porfiry, the social entry point of the inquiry (chapter IV of Part Three), and the first to formulate the method the other practices (chapter IV of Part Two).
- Zamyotov, the clerk at the police station: the one who carries the suspicion into the scene of the article with the most direct insinuation of the whole meeting (chapter V of Part Three).
- Nikolai (Mikolka), the painter: the false confession that disarms the siege (chapter VI of Part Four), and the one only Porfiry refuses, reading in it a religious desire to take on suffering, not guilt (chapter II of Part Six).
- Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov: the other siege, set up at the same time and by the opposite method (chapter I of Part Four), and the only one who knows of the crime through direct eavesdropping rather than deduction (chapter V of Part Five).