3
After the murder and after hiding the stolen objects, Raskolnikov returns to his small room. He is in a kind of delirium for five days, eating little, sleeping for long periods. His friend, the student Razumihin, looks over him and the servant girl in his rooming house, Nastasya, looks in on him at times offering food or tea. Razumihin informs him during one of his awakened periods that money has arrived from his mother and sister who will soon arrive in Petersburg. Razumihin, a young healthy positive type, uses the money to buy Raskolnikov a new set of clothes and he has brought to his room an acquaintance, the doctor Zossimov, to look over him. Raskolnikov treats them indifferently, even spitefully, paying little attention to them. Only when they start discussing the murders does Raskolnikov revive and give them his full attention. Pyotr Petrovitch Luzhin, a successful government official, arrives to present himself to Raskolnikov. He has recently become engaged to Raskolnikovs sister. He is a forty-five-year-old positive figure. Raskolnikov has found out through a letter sent to him by his mother just before the murders that his young sister has accepted Luzhins proposal of marriage only to gain a higher more secure place in society for her mother and her brother Raskolnikov whom she loves dearly. Razumihin and Zossimov treat Luzhin respectfully, agreeing in their conversation with some of Luzhins liberal ideas. Raskolnikov accuses Luzhin, breaking in on the conversation, of putting his mother and sister up in a cheap boarding house in Petersburg. Worse still, influenced by what his mother has reported of what Luzhin said during his courtship, Raskolnikov again breaks in on the conversation. And is it true, Raskolnikov asked Luzhin, in a voice quivering with fury and delight in insulting him, is it true that you told your fianceewithin an hour of her acceptance, that what pleased you mostwas that she was a beggarbecause it was better to raise a wife from poverty, so that you may have complete control over her, and reproach her with your being her benefactor? After defending himself with some embarrassment, the insult soon drives Luzhin from Raskolnikovs little roomHow could you how could you! Razumihin says to Raskolnikov just after Luzhin leaves, shaking his head in perplexity.
Let me alone let me alone all of you! Raskolnikov cried in a frenzy. Will you ever leave off tormenting me? I am not afraid of you! I am not afraid of anyone, anyone now! Get away from me. I want to be alone, alone, alone!
Razumihin and Zossimov leave at once but strangely Raskolnikov left alone does not remain in his room alone. His defense of his sister with his stinging insult to the man she is engaged to marry is the first genuinely human experience he has had since the murders and it perhaps motivates him to leave his room and seek some contact with the world outside of his room and his mind. Dostoevsky must bring his character into the everyday world of normal men and women if he is to somehow bring him also towards the world of human remorse which is never discovered in the human mind relying only on itself for guidance.
He dresses in his new set of clothes that Razumihin has bought for him, puts his rubles and his kopecks in his pocket, and steps out into the Petersburg night. It is eight oclock with the sun setting and he does not think where he is going. Thought now, for some reason, tortures him. He now feels that everything must be changed one way or another. We have suddenly left thought, the world of thought, and have begun taking steps towards the world of feeling. He walks toward the Hay Market. He comes to a young man with a barrel organ accompanying the singing of a girl of fifteen hoping to earn a few kopecks. Raskolnikov stops and listens among two or three listeners. He takes out a five kopeck piece and puts it in the girls hand. He is on the street and among people and the man who sliced an axe onto the head of Lizaveta who only put up her empty left hand touches the hand of a girl. It is a sign, a brief sign from Dostoevsky, that his character has taken the first step to the only world that counts because it is the only world that is real, the human world. Dostoevsky will never read any sign, any of the thousands of signs in the universe without and in the mind within, that lead anywhere upward and beyond mentally or physically, spiritually or scientifically. He will follow no sign unless it leads to a purely human step.
A middle-aged man is standing idly by Raskolnikov as they listen to the boy and girl singing to music from a street organ. Raskolnikov tries for human contact with a stranger. I love to hear singing to a street organ, said Raskolnikov, and his manner seemed strangely out of keeping with the subject. I like it on cold, dark, damp autumn evenings they must be damp when all the passers-by have pale green, sickly faces, or better still when wet snow is falling straight down, when theres no wind you know what I mean? And the street lamps shine through it I dont knowExcuse me, muttered the stranger, frightened by the question and Raskolnikovs strange manner, and he crossed over to the other side of the street.
Raskolnikovs manner is now strange in a way different from what it was before. Before his manner was strange because of his silence and his need to be separate from people around him. Now his manner is strange because of the way he talks to people in his surroundings. His need to talk seems like perhaps the first steps from his former silent madness ruled by his mind towards the Marmeladov kind of madness that has its origin in human feeling. But in Dostoevskys understanding of psychology, the mind and the soul are enemies and neither show any mercy to the other until one gives in to the other and commits itself because of its defeat to be the others servant. Raskolnikov has felt a minor touch of compassion and pressed five kopecks into the hand of a girl. He has sent off words of feeling and poetry to the astonished ears of a stranger. Something is making him speak. What if this something continues to put pressure on him? What if it presses him not to just talk but to talk about it? He had but one thought earlier when he left his room. His complete thought was that all this must be ended today, once for all, immediately; that he would not return home without it, because he would not go on living like that. Raskolnikov like Marmeladov has now a need to get everything out in the open.
His wanderings this night through the Hay Market and other places around Petersburg where normal people are doing normal things trying to enjoy the evening include a series of accidents. He tries to get information from hucksters in the Hay Market who had dealings with Lizaveta. He speaks to a young man standing before a shop. But he makes no progress with his questions. The young man quickly tires of talking to him and directs him laughing to an eating-house saying youll find princesses there too.La,la. He crosses a square and pushes his way into a dense crowd of peasants. He felt an unaccountable inclination to enter into conversation with people. But the peasants took no notice of him; they were all shouting in groups together. He wandered off silently to a marketplace that he knew well with dram shops and eating-houses. He saw women running in and out of various festive establishments. From one came the sounds of singing, the tinkling of a guitar and shouts of merriment. He passed a drunken soldier swearing and smoking a cigarette. A beggar was quarrelling with another beggar and a drunk was lying right across the road. Life, in other words, the bald unthinking life of real people, humans, is all around him. He is now in the midst of life unfolding not intentionally but accidentally. Two women speak to him seductively. One asks him for six kopecks for a drink and he gives her fifteen. A woman pock-markedcovered with bruises with her upper lip swollen but nonetheless alive and, so to speak, greedy to continue living to her last breath sets Raskolnikov to thinking about life. Where is it, thought Raskolnikov. Where is it Ive read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that hed have only the room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be! But Raskolnikov is still thinking not living and his thinking has him in such a firm grip that it will not allow him to live like those around him.