The Dream of the Mare

What It Is

The dream of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov on Petrovsky Island, in chapter V of Part One. He is a seven-year-old boy on a holiday, walking with his father to the cemetery where his grandmother and a little brother who died are buried, and at the door of a tavern he sees Mikolka, a strong, drunken peasant, beat a thin mare to death with the whip, with the cart pole and with an iron bar, before a crowd that laughs and eggs him on. The boy runs to her, embraces her dead muzzle and kisses her on the eyes and lips. The mare returns in the book in Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova, who, in dying, speaks of herself, in Russian, as a кляча, the nag that others have driven to the limit.

Where It Appears

In chapter V of Part One, after wandering the islands of the Neva, drinking a glass of vodka and eating a pie, Raskolnikov collapses in the brush of Petrovsky Island and dreams. Mikolka hitches the mare to a heavy cart and calls everyone to climb aboard, because he will make her run. When she cannot, he beats her with the whip, then with the cart pole and, finally, with the iron bar, until she dies. The crowd laughs, eggs him on and joins in the blows, and first an old man, then many voices, tell Mikolka that he has no cross on his chest. The boy runs among the adults, cries, tries to protect the mare and is pulled away by his father, who says it is a drunkards' affair and none of their business. The close is his gesture before the animal, already dead.

Still in chapter V of Part One, on waking drenched in sweat, Raskolnikov thinks it is fever, and then says to himself, in plain words, what the plan would require.

Still in chapter V of Part One, relieved, he renounces the plan and crosses the bridge feeling that an abscess in his heart has burst. The renunciation lasts until Sennaya Square, where he hears the hour from Lizaveta.

In chapter VII of Part One, when the old woman turns toward the window, the boy who ran to the dead mare brings the blunt side of the axe down on her head, almost without effort. The book sets side by side what he feels in the dream and what he does awake.

In chapter II of Part Two the elements of the dream return. On the Nikolaevsky Bridge a coachman lashes his back, because he nearly fell under the horses, and the crowd laughs. At night, at home, he lies down trembling, says the narrator, like a horse exhausted from running. He wakes in the dark to terrible screams: the landlady would be being beaten on the stairs, and the voice heard above is that of Lieutenant Ilya Petrovich. Nastasya, candle in hand, denies that anyone has struck anyone.

In chapter IV of Part Two the painter Nikolai appears, who in Razumikhin's narration is Mikolai, a popular form of the same name. In the story Razumikhin tells, he was found at an inn after attempting to hang himself.

In chapter VI of Part Three the second dream of the crime reverses the first. Now it is Raskolnikov who strikes with the axe, and the victim does not feel the blows and laughs softly, while behind the door voices laugh and whisper and the anteroom fills with people who only stare. The laughter that in the first dream came from the crowd against the mare now comes from the victim and from those whispering.

In chapter V of Part Four, mocking the method of Porfiry Petrovich, Raskolnikov uses, for the blow of the interrogation to the top of the head, the same Russian verb that the dream uses for Mikolka's blow with the iron bar, the verb for stunning with a single blow. Porfiry completes the image with the back of the axe, as seen in the axe.

In chapter VI of Part Four, after the painter's false confession, Raskolnikov calls him Mikolka while mocking the trade of Porfiry Petrovich, who tormented him until he accused himself. It is the diminutive of the peasant of the dream.

In chapter V of Part Five, Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova, thrown out of the house, goes into the street with her children in costume, teaching them to sing and dance before the curious, convinced that everyone will recognize in them the orphans of a nobleman. A decorated official gives her three rubles, a guard orders her to move on, the frightened children run away, and she chases them, trips and falls. The blood covering the ground comes from her chest. She refuses the priest and, in her last cry, between delirium and lucidity, speaks of herself as the nag they drove to the limit.

In chapter II of Part Six, Porfiry Petrovich uses the name of Mikolka to argue that suffering has meaning: he tells Raskolnikov not to laugh at it, because there is an idea in suffering and Mikolka is right.

What It Means

The dream gives Raskolnikov, before the theory, a pain that turns into action: the boy runs, embraces, beats his fists against Mikolka, and nothing can do anything against the crowd and the father. Afterward the book repeats the scene with different victims and instruments: the whip and the laughter on the bridge, the exhausted horse he himself becomes when he lies down, the second dream in which the victim is the one who laughs, the death of Katerina like that of the nag that could take no more. The boy's gesture also repeats itself in kisses. Raskolnikov kisses the foot of Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova in chapter IV of Part Four, kisses his mother's feet in chapter VII of Part Six, and kisses the earth of the square in chapter VIII of Part Six.

The dream is the only moment in the book in which Raskolnikov does, without calculating, what compassion demands. Two readings. In one, it is a warning from conscience, which rebels against the plan and makes him renounce it until Sennaya Square, in chapter V of Part One. In the other, it is the memory of a pain he has learned to keep silent, and the crime is the point at which that pain loses its voice. In both, when the mare returns in Katerina, in chapter V of Part Five, the man who in the dream was the boy running to her tries to speak with the woman who is dying and is refused, and the burial and the fate of the children are left to Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov.

Relationships

• Default themes: Compassion and Charity, Guilt, Suffering.
• Themes in the novel: Guilt, Suffering.
• Characters: Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova, Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova, Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov, Porfiry Petrovich.
• Related symbols: the axe, which the dream names before the weapon exists, and the crosses, because the crowd tells Mikolka that he has no cross.