Porfiry Petrovich is the examining magistrate in charge of the pawnbroker's murder, a relative of Razumikhin's, who surrounds Raskolnikov with conversations and psychology, without gathering any material evidence, and at the end proposes that he give himself up of his own free will.
He is a short, fat man with watery eyes, who receives visitors in a dressing gown and loses himself in digressions about his own apartment and his own health, so that his opponent is slow to recognize this as a method. The post was new in Russia: the examining magistrate, who investigates before trial, was created in 1860 and gained weight with the judicial reform of 1864, and it is through him that the book can have a duel of intelligences rather than a chase.
He begins with Raskolnikov's article, summarizing it on purpose more brutally than the text, in order to hear the correction. In Part Four he describes his own method: "Have you ever seen a moth before a candle?" When the painter Nikolay declares himself the murderer, Porfiry realizes that the answers are rehearsed and exclaims angrily: "he doesn't say words of his own!"
In Part Six he goes to Raskolnikov's house and says without beating about the bush: "well, you killed, Rodion Romanych!" He also admits that "all this damned psychology cuts both ways." Without proof and without an arrest, he offers a voluntary surrender with a reduced sentence, and says that "in suffering there is an idea." Raskolnikov rejects the reduction. Readers argue over whether the offer is sincerity or bait, and the text supports both.