The Resurrection of Lazarus

What It Is

Chapter 11 of the Gospel of John, the story of Lazarus of Bethany, which Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova reads aloud to Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov in her room, and the copy of the Gospel that contains it, which, in chapter II of the Epilogue, lies under his pillow. The book prepares it with a question from Porfiry Petrovich, returns it at the end as a word, resurrection through love, and leaves it without the reading that would close it: in the Russian text, Raskolnikov picks up the Gospel at this same chapter and does not open it.

Where It Appears

In chapter IV of Part Three, on the way to the house of Porfiry Petrovich, Raskolnikov thinks that before him too he will have to sing Lazarus, a Russian expression for feigning lament and begging for pity. It is another use of the name, which says nothing about the episode at Bethany.

In chapter V of Part Three, after hearing the exposition of the theory, Porfiry Petrovich asks Raskolnikov whether he believes in the New Jerusalem, in God and in the resurrection of Lazarus. Raskolnikov answers that he believes, stumbling over the first syllable, and asks why the judge wants to know all this; the answer is that he believes it literally.

In chapter III of Part Four, asking his mother and sister to forget him and stop looking for him, Raskolnikov says that perhaps everything will rise again, and soon returns to the threat to hate them if they do not give up on him. The verb of resurrection appears in his mouth before the reading, with no reference to the episode.

In chapter IV of Part Four, at eleven at night, Raskolnikov goes to the room of Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova and, after pressing her about the fate of Katerina's children until she repeats that God will not allow it, asks what sustains her. She answers vehemently that without God she would be nothing.

Still in chapter IV of Part Four, on the dresser there is an old New Testament with a leather cover, which Lizaveta Ivanovna brought at Sonia's request. Raskolnikov leafs through it and asks where Lazarus is, and she, without moving, tells him not to look there: it is in the fourth Gospel. She hesitates and asks why he wants it, if he does not believe; he insists, reminds her that she read it to Lizaveta, and Sonia opens the book with trembling hands.

Still in chapter IV of Part Four, she begins twice without managing the first sound, and on the third word her voice breaks and returns. She reads chapter 11 of John from the beginning: Martha going out to meet Jesus, Mary at his feet, the stone that is ordered removed. In Russian her voice catches on the fourth word, the four days Lazarus spent in the tomb. At the cry that calls the dead man she reads aloud, in ecstasy, trembling and chilled, as if she were seeing the scene, and imagines that Raskolnikov, blind and unbelieving like the Jews in the account, will believe right there. She stops short of the belief of those who saw what Jesus did: she closes the book, standing, and says only that it is all about the resurrection of Lazarus.

Still in chapter IV of Part Four, Raskolnikov asked for the chapter she read to Lizaveta, the woman he killed, and does not say why. After about five minutes of silence he declares that he has left his mother and sister, that only Sonia remains to him, and that the two of them must go together.

Still in chapter IV of Part Four, Sonia spends the night in fever, dreaming of the reading and of him, who kisses her feet. In the empty room next door, behind the door, Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov has stood the whole time and heard the entire conversation.

In chapter IV of Part Six, Svidrigailov tells Raskolnikov how Avdotya Romanovna Raskolnikova, moved by the lost man she had been described, wanted to save him, bring him to reason, resurrect him and lead him to nobler ends. He had heard the reading of Lazarus behind the door, in chapter IV of Part Four. The verb of resurrection appears here as the risk of a kind-hearted young woman, and Svidrigailov uses it as a method: he feigned being moved and flattered her.

In chapter II of the Epilogue, Raskolnikov torments himself with the question of why he did not kill himself at the river's edge, and explains it by a dull instinct. The narrator suggests another cause: a foreboding, already there, of the falsity of his own convictions, which could announce a reversal and a future resurrection, and which he did not understand.

Still in chapter II of the Epilogue, after the illness and the wait for Sonia, she reaches him at the riverbank, where he is sitting on logs facing the steppe, and he throws himself at her feet, weeping. The narrator says that love resurrected them.

Still in chapter II of the Epilogue, that night, on the bunk, he no longer concludes anything, he only feels: instead of dialectics, says the narrator, life had come.

Still in chapter II of the Epilogue, under the pillow lies Sonia's Gospel, the same one from which she read the resurrection of Lazarus. Raskolnikov asked her for it shortly before falling ill, and she brought it in silence, never having touched on the subject of religion. Now he takes it up out of reflex and, the Russian says, still has not opened it; he only wonders whether her convictions cannot be his, at least the feelings and the aspirations. The chapter closes by refusing to tell what would come.

What It Means

The Lazarus episode runs through the book as a promise that the page does not fulfill. Porfiry asks whether Raskolnikov believes in it literally in chapter V of Part Three, Raskolnikov asks Sonia to read it to him in chapter IV of Part Four, and she reads only as far as where the Jews believe and closes the book. The word resurrection then passes through the farewell to the family, through the mouth of Svidrigailov and through the narrator's at the end, and the Gospel, once in Raskolnikov's hands, stays closed.

The book gives the episode the position of a promise. There are two readings of who Lazarus is. In the first, it is Raskolnikov, the dead man who comes out because he is called, and the one calling is Sonia, who in chapter II of the Epilogue goes to the hospital gate and sits beside him at the riverbank. In the second, Raskolnikov is one of the Jews in the account, those who see and believe, and the miracle is what Sonia does, reading with a voice breaking to a man who does not believe, and not what happens to him. The book does not decide, and leaves the Gospel closed so that both readings stay standing.

Relationships

• Default themes: Redemption, Suffering.
• Themes in the novel: Suffering.
• Characters: Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, Porfiry Petrovich, Lizaveta Ivanovna, Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov, Avdotya Romanovna Raskolnikova.
• Related symbols: the crosses, because the Gospel came from Lizaveta, like the copper cross; the dream of the plague, the delirium that precedes the river scene; and the cubicle, where Sonia's room is the closed space in which the reading takes place.