Poverty is not a Crime
Crime and Punishment Week 8: Book Two, Chapter 1
Welcome to week 8 of our Crime and Punishment 2024 read-along.
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Part Two, Chapter 1 Synopsis
All quotations in this post are taken from Roger Cockrell’s translation of 2022, Alma Classics, © Roger Cockrell 2022
‘Later he was to remember much of it.’ - temporal shift.
This week’s characters
Characters in this week’s chapter in the order that they are mentioned:
Raskolnikov • Nastasya • The Caretaker • Desk Clerk at Police Station • Alexander Zamyotov • Woman in Mourning • Louisa Ivanovna • Ilya Petrovich • Nikodim Fomich
This week’s theme:
Poverty is not a crime, my friend, whatever you think!
— Nikodim Fomich to ‘Lieutenant Powder-Keg’
Raskolnikov is now a double murderer. He was already enduring the punishment before he committed the two murders. How will he handle it now that he’s actually committed the crime?
We left him lying in a daze on his sofa in his room, having somehow managed to get back there safely without being seen by anyone. He also managed to clean the axe and return it to its home.
He wakes up from a fever dream and it all comes flooding back. He’s shivering with cold and realises that he hadn’t even latched his door when he got back to his room. He latches it. He still has the stolen purse in his pockets and there’s congealed blood on the frayed edges of his trousers. He tries to hide the stolen goods in a hole in the wall behind the wallpaper but soon realises that that will not do. We get another glimpse into just how poorly planned this crime was. He was expecting to steal only money, not valuables. He’s in a panicked state—understandably—and is not thinking rationally. He wonders whether he’s being punished already:
“It can’t be beginning already, can it?I can’t be being punished already, can I? Yes, yes, that must be it – look at that!”1
He starts to think about the forensic evidence—the loop in his jacket sleeve, traces of blood on the stolen purse and inside his pocket—and actually becomes quite jubilant, seeing this as proof that “my reason hasn’t entirely deserted me.”
Yeah, right!
Through the writing, we get a real sense of his state of mind: the panic and tension—there’s no turning back.
Nastasya comes to the door and shouts in her usual style. For her, of course, nothing has changed. But Raskolnikov has crossed over the line. For him, nothing will ever be as it was. Nastasya’s accompanied by the caretaker, and we get a callback to the latched door at the crime scene. Raskolnikov usually doesn’t latch his door, and in his panicked state earlier on, he’d discovered that it wasn’t latched and so had latched it. That raises suspicion on Nastasya’s part.
The caretaker is there to issue him a summons to the police station.
Nastasya asks what he’s holding. It’s the blook-soaked sock and frayed ends of his trousers in his sleep.
“Look at you, going to sleep clutching all those rags as if they were some soft of treasure…”
And then there’s the whole sock scene. He puts on the blood-soaked sock as he prepares to head out to the police station. Then takes it off ‘with loathing and horror’ then puts it back on again. All the while, we’re given his interior monologue of desperation. It’s really quite a scene.
Heat
And then we’re back out into the heatwave of St Petersburg. The descriptive writing here really gives us a sense of how it feels on that hot, dry July day.
Outside, the heat was as intolerable as ever: throughout this whole period there hadn't been so much as a single drop of rain. Once again the dust, bricks and mortar, once again the stench from the shops and the taverns, once again drunks everywhere, the Finnish pedlars and the ramshackle cabs.
The sun was shining right into his eyes, making it painful to see, and his head was now in a total spin - the usual sensation of a feverish person who has suddenly emerged outside on a bright sunny day.
He heads to the police station—in new premises, a quarter of a mile away—and imagines himself falling to his knees and confessing.
The interior of the police station is hot, stuffy and smelly. A clerk waves Raskolnikov on, and he approaches the head clerk (Alexander Grigoryevich Zamyotov), who is dealing with a poorly-dressed woman in mourning and a well-dressed, blotchy-faced woman (Louisa Ivanovna). The police assistant superintendent, Ilya Petrovich, enters.
Raskolnikov is ordered to pay the back rent he owes his landlady. He can’t believe his luck. The summons had nothing to do with the murder and he feels a sense of relief.
Ilya Petrovich then turns his attention to Louisa Ivanovna and reprimands her for a party that got out of control at her flat. She explains that it was a drunken writer who went on a bit of a rampage, and Ilya Petrovich castigates writers in general. ‘They’re all the same, these writers, literary fellows, students, publicity-seekers…’
Louisa ‘Lavisa’ Ivanovna
Ilya Petrovich addresses Louisa Ivanovna somewhat disparagingly as “highly respected Lavisa Ivanovna”. It seems that he sees the name Louisa as being “unbearably pretentious, given her profession and status, and rechristens her with a name that sounds both mocking and common to the Russian ear. It will be repeated by other characters.”2
Enter Nikodim Fomich, the police superintendent. He admonishes Ilya Petrovich, ‘Lieutenant Powder-Keg’:
‘Poverty is not a crime, my friend, whatever you think!’
Raskolnikov relaxes and explains his situation. He’s ‘worn down’ by poverty. We learn of his agreement with his landlady to wed her daughter.
Raskolnikov’s ‘sensation’
There’s a very interesting scene that follows this, where we’re given a glimpse into Raskolnikov’s state of mind.
… he had suddenly become totally indifferent to what anyone else thought about him… he now felt so empty inside.
Never before had he experienced such a strange and terrible feeling… – the most agonizing sensation he had ever experienced through his entire life.
It’s hard to imagine how Raskolnikov must feel, but Dostoyevsky does a wonderful job of making us feel uneasy. Raskolnikov’s emotions are vacillating between bravado and horror, from feeling invincible to a desire to fall on his knees and confess. This is the punishment that began in his mind long before he even committed the crime, but now it has moved up a gear.
Soon after these feelings are expressed, Raskolnikov overhears a conversation between the police officers about the murder. Koch and Pestryakov are being held for questioning. Raskolnikov faints. When he comes to, he’s questioned about his health and his movements the day before, which he responds to with short answers. He’s then allowed to go and he leaves with his anxiety, ‘utterly overwhelming him, from head to toe.’
Translation Notes
I’m a poor, sick student, dejected by poverty. — Oliver Ready (Я бедный и больной студент, удрученный бедностью.)
I’m a poor, sick student, worn down by poverty. — Cockrell
In Part One / Chapter 1, all translators used ‘crushed by poverty’, except Oliver Ready, who translated it as ‘suffocated by poverty’. (Он был задавлен бедностью;)
I’ve provided translations of six different parts of the text from this chapter in the spreadsheet. Click the button to read through them.
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Crime and Punishment, Roger Cockrell, 2022 (as are all the other quotations in this post)
Footnote from Oliver Ready’s translation, p529, Penguin Classics Deluxe edition, 2014
Hi Cams, your faithful follower 😉 has had a slight accident (nothing serious, but painful). I find it hard to read and concentrate at the moment. But I will be back soon I hope!