Welcome to Week 3 of my slow-read of Crime and Punishment. This week’s chapter is Part One, Chapter 3.
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This week’s characters
Characters in this week’s chapter in the order that they are mentioned:
Raskolnikov • Pulkheria Raskolnikova • Luzhin • Dunya
Part One, Chapter 3 Synopsis
All quotations in this post are taken from Roger Cockrell’s translation of 2022, Alma Classics, © Roger Cockrell 2022
He wakes in his room feeling angry. We learn that his housekeeper can make him so annoyed that he could ‘barely stop himself from throwing a fit – such is often the case with obsessive people who become too preoccupied with something.’ This made me think of autism and/or ADHD, which is perhaps what’s making Raskolnikov so relatable to me in this reading. It just seems so clear to me that there’s a potential diagnosis there now.
The housekeeper comes in and brings him tea. She mentions that the landlady, Praskovya Pavlovna, has complained to the police about Raskolnikov for not paying his rent. He doesn’t seem too bothered about this. She gives Raskolnikov a letter from his mother then leaves.
In the letter, we’re introduced to more characters in a similar way to how we were introduced to Marmeladov’s family in the previous chapter—a clever plot device that moves the story along.
Raskolnikov left university some months ago because he couldn’t afford to support himself. She sent fifteen roubles that she’d borrowed. Raskolnikov had written two months ago upon hearing that his sister, Dunya, had been treated very badly at the Svidrigailovs’ house. She didn’t reply because she was worried that, if she’d told the truth, Raskolnikov would have dropped everything and come to get satisfaction for his sister. This gives us an idea of how Raskolnikov feels about his family - a fierce sense of loyalty. Dunya had taken work at the Svidrigailovs’ and had taken an advance payment so that she could send sixty roubles to Raskolnikov last year.
Svidrigailov comes onto Dunya in a lecherous way. She rejects his advances but his wife, Marfa Petrovna, overhears a tryst in the garden and puts all the blame on Dunya. She fires her and goes around town spreading the news to anyone who will listen—which, it seems, is everyone. They do love a bit of gossip. Dunya and her mother are essentially cancelled by the townsfolk in a scene that wouldn’t look out of place in 2020 Portland or Seattle. This included a plan to smear their gates with pitch, which Cockrell tells us was ‘a customary way of expressing outrage in pre-revolutionary Russia.’1
Soon after, Svidrigailov repents and proves Dunya’s innocence by showing his wife a letter that Dunya wrote admonishing him in the strongest of terms for his outrageous behaviour towards her and Marfa Petrovna. Svidrigailov is a weak man who can’t help but follow his base urges but who then finds the compassion to do the right thing, possibly through a sense of guilt. He doesn’t seem to be going out of his way to save his own hide, and this reminds me of Marmeladov in the previous chapter, who professed joy at being dragged by the hair by his wife upon returning home after a six-day bender.
Once Dunya’s name has been cleared, she receives a marriage proposal from Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin, a court councillor and distant relation of Marfa Petrovna’s. There follows a description of Luzhin, in which the women describe him as ‘rather conceited’ and ‘seemingly kind-hearted’, while he describes himself as ‘a man with a positive outlook on life, but who shares “the convictions of today’s generation of young people”, and an enemy to all prejudices.’
Upon receiving Dunya’s consent to marry, he states that ‘he had always decided he would get married to an honest girl, but to one who came without a dowry, and definitely to someone who had experienced poverty — because […] not only should a husband never feel beholden to his wife, but it would be far better for a wife to look on her husband as her benefactor.’
Would you marry that guy? Dunya and Pulkheria Alexandrovna give him the benefit of the doubt and try to soften his statement, with Pulkheria’s claiming to have forgotten his exact words and Dunya’s stating that ‘words are not actions.’
While Pulkheria Alexandrovna’s opinion of Luzhin is not particularly favourable, she sees it as a good match for Dunya and as a potential opportunity for Raskolnikov’s advancement. It feels like she doesn’t know her son very well if she thinks he’ll go along with that, which is strange, given how she said that she knew he would march home to demand satisfaction upon hearing about the Svidrigailov situation, had he only known about it. But for whatever reason, both women seem convinced that this is the right move, if only for Raskolnikov. So, we have Sonya going out on the yellow prostitution passport in chapter 2 for her family’s sake, and now we have Dunya’s accepting a marriage proposal from a man she doesn’t even like for her family’s sake. There’s a clear parallel here.
Marmeladov is an alcoholic, which is often a sign of an unhappy man for whatever reason. And Raskolnikov is also suffering from mental health problems, at the very least the ‘hypochondria’ we read about on the first page of chapter 1—two unwell men whose daughters are prostituting themselves for them.
The matter was left there, but Dunya can now think of nothing else. She has been in some kind of feverish condition for several days now, and has already devised a whole plan, according to which you could, in the course of time, become an associate, even a partner, in Pyotr Petrovich’s legal firm … I am an total agreement with her, Rodya, and share all her plans and hopes…
Pulheria Alexandrovna then goes on to say that she and Dunya will be travelling to St Petersburg ‘very soon’. They are so excited about seeing Raskolnikov again that Dunya stated that ‘she would marry Pyotr Petrovich for that reason alone’.
Since the engagement, Pulheria Alexandrovna’s credit rating has improved so that she may now borrow more money from Vakhrushin. Luzhin is going to pay for their baggage to be sent, but they’re happy to travel 90 versts—some 96 kilometres—in a muzhik’s horse and cart.
God is dead
At the end of her letter, Pulkeria Alexandrovna instructs Raskolnikov to ‘love your sister Dunya, Rodya — love her as she loves you, and know that her love for you is boundless, greater than her love for herself. […] Do you still pray to God, Rodya, as you used to? […] I am afraid that you might have been affected by the new fashionable spirit of atheism.’
Nietzsche proposed that God is dead in 1882, and Dostoyevsky formulated the same idea even earlier. Nietzsche coined the term Übermensch to describe someone who considers themselves to be outside of history, someone to whom the moral laws of God and society do not apply. This term is often applied to Raskolnikov, but remember that Raskolnikov came first and it is known that Nietzsche read Dostoyevsky. Whether he read Crime and Punishment is open to debate, at least according to what I’ve found online, but they are certainly drinking from the same well. There’s more to come in the novel about the philosophical concepts of free will and will to power, two concepts I would love to learn more about.
Translation Points
The themes of this chapter are self-sacrifice for one’s family (Dunya) and atheism, so I’ve chosen to compare that line in Pulkheria’s Alexandrovna’s letter that I quoted above. All eight translations are in the comparison spreadsheet.
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Crime and Punishment, Roger Cockrell, p522
I would definitely NOT marry this guy! 😉 It was a captivating and even amusing read, though perhaps Petrowitsj's terrible personality is a bit all too obvious and the trick of having Raskolnikows mother actually saying the opposite of what she writes gets overused a little. I was intrigued by the end -- why does Raskolnikow have an evil smile on his face? Dostojewski knows how to grip his readers and make them want to read on.