The Dream of the Plague

What It Is

The feverish dream of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov in the prison hospital in Siberia, recounted in chapter II of the Epilogue, at the end of Lent and in Easter week: the whole world condemned to a plague unlike any seen before, coming from the depths of Asia into Europe, caused by new trichinae, microscopic beings that are spirits endowed with intelligence and will. Whoever receives them goes mad and judges himself more intelligent and more steadfast in the truth than ever. No one agrees with anyone about good and evil, peoples kill one another, and only a few chosen pure ones are saved, whom no one sees or hears.

Where It Appears

The dream appears only in chapter II of the Epilogue, but it takes to the limit, on a worldwide scale, what the earlier parts set up on the scale of a single person.

In chapter V of Part Two, Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin sets out, in Raskolnikov's room, the doctrine that self-interest founds everything: love yourself first, and the more whole fortunes there are, the firmer society becomes. Raskolnikov answers that, carried to its ultimate consequences, it authorizes putting people to the knife.

In chapter V of Part Three, in the house of Porfiry Petrovich, the judge sums up Raskolnikov's article: people are divided into ordinary and extraordinary; the ordinary must live in obedience and have no right to transgress the law, while the extraordinary have it.

Still in chapter V of Part Three, Raskolnikov recognizes the summary and closes the core of the doctrine with the two groups of men, the master of the present and the master of the future.

In chapter VI of Part Three, after being called a murderer in the street, Raskolnikov raves alone: he imagines the prophet with a sword who commands without explaining, identifies with him, and says that he killed a principle, not a person. The order he imagines is addressed to the trembling creature, the category in which he discovers himself.

In chapter IV of Part Five, facing Sonia, he discards the reasons one by one, the money, the mother, humanity, Napoleon, and keeps a formulation that has no end outside himself: he killed for himself, for himself alone.

In chapter V of Part Six, Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov sums up the theory to Avdotya Romanovna Raskolnikova as a little theory of the young man's, in which people divide into material and special people, for whom the law is not written and who compose the laws for the rest, the material, the refuse, and he dismisses it as a theory like any other.

In chapter VII of Part Six, when Avdotya Romanovna Raskolnikova says that whoever goes to suffering washes away half the crime, Raskolnikov explodes: the old woman was a louse that served no one, and he does not think of washing away what he does not see as a crime.

In chapter II of the Epilogue, already in prison, he takes up the theory again: his thought was no more foolish than those that swarm through the world, and the benefactors of humanity who took power should have been executed at their first steps, but they endured the steps, and therefore they are right. He did not endure it. He recognizes guilt in not having borne the crime and in having given himself up, and he does not repent the murder.

Still in chapter II of the Epilogue, already convalescent in the hospital, where he spent the end of Lent and Easter week, he recalls the dreams of the fever: the world condemned to a plague unlike any seen before, coming from the depths of Asia into Europe. New trichinae, microscopic beings that are spirits endowed with intelligence and will, enter bodies, and whoever receives them goes mad. Whole peoples fall ill, no one understands anyone, no one knows whom to judge or what to call good and evil; they kill one another in senseless rage, armies devour each other on the march, workshops stop, fire and famine come. Only a few pure and chosen ones could be saved, destined to begin a new people and a new life, but no one saw them or heard their voice.

Still in chapter II of the Epilogue, what torments Raskolnikov is the memory of the delirium, which takes time to pass: the Russian says it bothered him that that senseless delirium should echo so sadly and so painfully in his memory. Then he appears at the infirmary window, seeing Sonia standing at the hospital gate.

What It Means

The dream gives a world-scale dimension to what Raskolnikov's article said of a few. In the theory of chapter V of Part Three, only the extraordinary have the right to transgress the law, and the ordinary live in obedience. In the plague, everyone judges himself extraordinary: each holds his own judgments, his scientific conclusions and his moral convictions as unshakable, and the result is that no one obeys, no one understands anyone, and no one knows whom to judge. The only ones who escape are the pure and chosen whom the dream does not let anyone see or hear.

The theory is refuted by the dream in the one way it did not foresee: by generalization. If the right belongs to everyone, there are no ordinary people left to obey, and what the article promised as the engine of the future becomes a war of convictions, like Napoleon's campaign, which Raskolnikov thinks of in chapter VI of Part Three, now waged by everyone at once. Two readings of the dream. In one, it is the narrator's judgment on the theory, which Raskolnikov himself cannot make, because in prison he still maintains that he does not repent the crime. In the other, it is the first time he sees it from the outside, and therefore the memory torments him more than the illness.

Relationships

• Default themes: Reason, Pride, Redemption.
• Themes in the novel: Reason, Pride.
• Characters: Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladova, Porfiry Petrovich, Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin, Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov, Avdotya Romanovna Raskolnikova.
• Related symbols: the resurrection of Lazarus, the Gospel that stays closed after the dream, and the dream of the mare, the other dream of Raskolnikov with a crowd, the first in the book.