Svidrigailov is a widowed landowner, Dunya's former employer, who tells Raskolnikov that the two of them are birds of a feather, and who shoots himself through the temple at dawn on the day after Dunya tells him she will never love him.
Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov enters the book as news: the mother's letter says he pursued Dunya when she was a governess in his house. He appears in person, sitting beside Raskolnikov's sofa at the end of Part Three, and in the next conversation he says that his dead wife, Marfa Petrovna, visits him to discuss trifles, and he describes eternity as "one little room, something like a village bathhouse, black with soot, with spiders in every corner."
He lives on the other side of the wall from Sonia's room and hears the entire confession. He uses the secret to lead Dunya to an empty, locked apartment; she shoots, the first bullet grazes his temple, the second misfires, and she throws the revolver away. He asks whether he can be loved and hears: "Never!" Then he puts the key on the table and tells her to leave quickly.
On his last night he gives Sonia receipts and bonds that add up to three thousand rubles, says that Raskolnikov has "two roads: either a bullet in the forehead, or the Vladimirka," leaves fifteen thousand rubles to his fiancee, and at dawn tells a sentry that he is going to America, and shoots. The book does not explain the gesture. It may be read as an ending decided since Dunya rejected him, or as the gesture of a man who can no longer invent another. The relationship with Raskolnikov also admits two readings: Svidrigailov would be the one who carries out, without a troubled conscience, the logic the other only thought, or someone who never had a theory, only appetite, and for that reason summarizes Raskolnikov's theory before Dunya as "a theory like any other." In both cases, it is the way out that Raskolnikov does not take: the bullet, instead of the road to Siberia.