Semyon Zakharovich Marmeladov

Who He Is

Semyon Zakharovich Marmeladov is a retired civil servant of more than fifty, a titular councillor, a drunkard with a florid way of speaking, who introduces himself to Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov in a basement tavern and picks him as his listener because he takes him for an educated and sensitive man, when the other patrons only laugh at him.

He is the father of Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova, his daughter by his first marriage, and the husband of Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova, an officer's widow, consumptive and haughty, who married him in tears because no relative would take her in and who has three small children.

What he wants is to be judged and punished so that he can be forgiven, and what he fears is not his wife's blows but her gaze, the red blotches on her cheeks and the children's crying.

What he knows about himself holds no secret: he tells everything to anyone who will listen, and the text leaves open whether this telling of everything is repentance or the defense of everything.

He is run over by a carriage in the street, thirty paces from home, and dies at home, in the arms of the daughter whom poverty sent out onto the street.

Trajectory

In chapter II of Part One he pours out the family's story to a stranger: his wife's marriage, the daughter who went out one afternoon after her stepmother told her ironically to go and came back with thirty rubles, which she laid on the table without a word, the job he got back out of a superior's compassion, the weeks of coffee and new clothes at home, and the day after the first paycheck, when he stole the key to his wife's trunk and drank for five nights in a row. The question on which he founds the defense of everything is the same one that comes back to Raskolnikov's memory the next day:

When the tavern keeper asks what good it does to pity a man like that, he gets to his feet with his arm outstretched, as if expecting the provocation, and asks for the opposite of pity:

Raskolnikov takes him home, where Katerina Ivanovna drags him by the hair while he cries out that it gives him pleasure. That day he had gone to Sonia's to ask for money for his hangover, and she had given him her last thirty kopecks without reproaching him, which he feels as the worst of all. In chapter IV of Part One his question about having nowhere left to go returns to Raskolnikov together with the idea that does not yet have a name.

In chapter VII of Part Two he appears run over, recognized by Raskolnikov in the light of a street lamp and carried home. He comes to, asks for a priest and confesses in broken sounds. He tries to ask his wife's forgiveness, and she tells him to be quiet, knowing what he means to say, and when Sonia appears at the door, dressed like the girls of the street, it is of her that he asks it:

He falls from the sofa and dies in her arms. In chapter III of Part Three Raskolnikov explains the blood on his clothes to his mother and sister by saying that he helped carry a run-over civil servant who died, and that he gave the widow all the money his mother had sent him. In chapter IV of Part Four Raskolnikov tells Sonia that he chose her long ago to hear who killed Lizaveta, ever since her father spoke of her.

In chapters I and II of Part Five he is already the dead man of the solemn funeral rites: Luzhin hears from the landlady that they will be solemn and that nearly all the lodgers have been invited, and Katerina Ivanovna spends about ten of the twenty-odd rubles Raskolnikov gave her on honoring her husband and showing the house who she is, displaying the certificate of commendation he had mentioned in the tavern.

Themes Embodied

Marmeladov is the first voice in the book to formulate what the novel will put to the test, and he formulates it before the crime: a man can ask to be punished rather than spared, because forgiveness is worth something only to someone who accepts the verdict. Raskolnikov hears this a few days before committing what he commits and, in chapter IV of Part Five, does the reverse: he hands the fact over to Sonia and refuses the public gesture she asks for, because he recognizes no authority in those who would judge him. The distance between the drunkard who offers himself to the cross and the student who offers himself to no one is one of the measures of Guilt in the book.

His second service to the book is to show who pays the bill. He asks for punishment and for justice at the same time, and the one who collects is Sonia, who gives him her last thirty kopecks without reproaching him and goes out onto the street to support the household he drinks away. The novel does not judge the father; it makes the reader see the price of the confession that does not change a life, and it is at this point that Raskolnikov's compassion, which hands over the coins and immediately regrets it, gets its first measure, in the theme Compassion and Charity.

The phrase about the cross has two readings, and the text supports both: sincere repentance from a man who cannot bear to be spared, or the role the drunkard has made of himself, which the tavern, laughing, recognizes. His last plea for forgiveness, to Sonia and not to his wife, keeps the ambiguity: it may be the father who knows what his daughter paid, it may be the man who knows who gives forgiveness without asking for payment.

Relationships

• Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova: the wife who drags him by the hair and whose forgiveness he cannot manage to ask; her gaze is what he fears.
• Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova: the daughter whose forgiveness he asks as he dies, and who gave him her last thirty kopecks on the day he tells Raskolnikov his story.
• Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov: the educated listener he chooses, the man who pays for the funeral with his mother's money, and the one who inherits from him the question about having nowhere to go.