Everyone must go at their own pace
Crime and Punishment Week 34: Part Six, Chapters 3–5
Welcome to Week 34 of my slow-read of Crime and Punishment. This week’s chapter is Part Six, Chapters 3–5.
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Sorry for the break between posts. My psychology is such that if I plan dates for these posts, I end up procrastinating. I don’t know why that it is, especially given my love for this book and how much I enjoy making bookish content Psychology is hard. I don’t think I’ll find the answers I need in Crime and Punishment either, lol.
I’m going to go through three chapters today and then another post with the last three chapters, followed by one last one on the epilogue. Chapter 5 in particular was exhilarating!
This week’s characters
(I don’t include Raskolnikov in this listing as he’s in most of the chapters)
Synopsis
Rodion leaves his room after his grilling from Porfiry. We get the sense that the gig is up. He heads off to find Svidrigailov, knowing, as he does, that Svidrigailov knows his secret after having eavesdropped on Rodion’s confession to Sonya. He finds Svidrigailov in a tavern which, apparently he’d mentioned to him while Rodion was ill. They have a fascinating conversation and it’s some of the most readable—and darkest—dialogue in the whole novel.
Rodion is concerned that Svidrigailov is going to use his secret as leverage against Dunya, and he’s right to be concerned because that’s precisely what happens. Rodion mentions Dunya’s having received a letter, but he doesn’t know from whom or what it contains. In his mind, Rodion threatens to kill Svidrigailov if he tries anything on with Dunya.
… he could only settle such questions by reaching one simple conclusion. “If that’s the case, I’ll kill him,” he thought in bleak despair.
Once a killer…
He later makes this threat directly to Svidrigailov:
Perhaps you ought to know why I've come: it is to tell you directly that, if you are still harbouring any designs on my sister and hoping to turn any information you've just acquired about me to your advantage in this connection, then I will kill you before you can put me in prison. I mean what I say, and you know I will keep my word.
And we know he’ll keep his word, too. Svidrigailov might just have met his match with Rodion. Are they similar in their neuroses? Or are the opposites?
The discussion carries on into the next chapter, where Svidrigailov goes into the whole story of his relationship with Dunya and with his late wife, Marfa Petrovna. He believes that Dunya is the type of character who will sacrifice herself to save others, and that that is what she’s doing when she enters into a relationship with Svidrigailov—she wants to fix him.
All that she craves and demands is to be tortured on behalf of someone else as quickly as possible—failing which she would very probably throw herself out of the window.
Svidrigailov’s story gets darker and darker. We don’t get details, but the allusions lead us to believe that there could be a whole underworld of crimes against minors, involving Svidrigailov, his late wife and his landlady, Madam Resslich. Svidrigailov tells Rodion that he’s to be married to a young girl who has yet to reach the age of 16. Dana writes this up well in her Substack so head over and read her insightful commentary on this.
Chapter Five
This chapter is an absolute belter. Such drama!
Svidrigailov and Rodion part ways. Svidrigailov makes it look as if he’s heading to the islands in a cab, but as soon as Rodion’s back is turned, Svidrigailov hops back out the cab and starts following Rodion. Dunya walks past Rodion but he doesn’t see her.
Svidrigailov persuades Dunya to go with him to his room and, once there, he locks her in. It was indeed he who send Dunya the letter mentioned earlier. He shows her where he sat listening to Rodion’s confession to Sonya and offers to save them all if she’ll only agree to love him. This she cannot agree to. She pulls out a revolver, which apparently she’d stolen from Svidrigailov’s late wife. Why would Marfa Petrovna have had a revolver? We can only speculate, but given their ‘open relationship’ agreement, it seems unlikely that she would have had the weapon to protect her from her husband.
We get the sense that Svidrigailov’s love for Dunya is real, if indeed he’s capable of real love. But Dunya’s having none of it and she shoots, misses, shoots again and misfires. He gives her a chance to take another shot, but she drops the revolver. He asks if she could ever love him and she replies, ‘Never’. He then lets her go.
Drama!
Why would Svidrigailov let Dunya shoot him? Is it because he’s found true love for the first time and it’s unrequited? We learned in his conversation with Rodion that he fears death:
I am afraid of death, and I don’t like people talking about it.
Yet he faces death with equanimity when Dunya points the gun at him.
And there we leave it. Next time we’ll be going to the end of Part Six, which is the end of the novel before the epilogue. Nearly there, and we’re still no closer to knowing whether there’s redemption in Rodion’s future or not!
All quotations in this post are taken from Roger Cockrell’s translation of 2022, Alma Classics, © Roger Cockrell 2022
Translation Points
The word ‘hoodwinked’ stood out to me in Cockrell’s translation. Little did I know it was the Herculean pillars in the second clause that would throw up the most interesting variations!
Russian - Не будь этого, ведь этак застрелиться, пожалуй, пришлось бы.
Garnett - If I hadn’t this, I might have to shoot myself.
Coulson - If it were not for it, one might have to shoot oneself without more ado.
McDuff - If I didn't have that, I'd probably just have to shoot myself.
P&V - Without that, really, one might perhaps have to shoot oneself.
Ready - If it weren't for this, you might end up having to shoot yourself.
Pasternak Slater - If all that didn't exist, he'd probably have to shoot himself.
Katz - If it weren't for this, one might have to shoot oneself.
Cockrell - Without it, you might as well shoot yourself.
Head on over to the comparison spreadsheet to see the phrase in context, along with examples from every chapter so far in EIGHT different translations.
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I just finished Crime and Punishment and I'm glad I read it, but I'm also glad it's done. I found parts of the book hard to understand — characters often react in ways that made no sense to me at all. And Raskolnikov is such an unpleasant type that I kept losing interest in him. (I liked Swidrigajlow better, I must say). It's a swampy, fever dream kind of story, with brilliant scenes, and I think I would have to read it again in order to make more sense of it.
Thank you, Cams, for your interesting pieces on both story and translation!
I was way behind too. Now in the middle of part 6, chapter 2.