Welcome to Week 5 of my slow-read of Crime and Punishment. This week’s chapter is Part One, Chapter 5.
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This week’s characters
Characters in this week’s chapter in the order that they are mentioned. Raskolnikov isn’t mentioned because he’s pretty much in every chapter.
Part One, Chapter 5 Synopsis
All quotations in this post are taken from Roger Cockrell’s translation of 2022, Alma Classics, © Roger Cockrell 2022
Raskolnikov is wondering why he’s going to see Razumikhin. He decides he’ll go after that, meaning, of course, the murder. He’s then filled with revulsion at the very idea and can’t face going back to his apartment because that’s where ‘all this had been developing for more than a month now.’
He becomes nervous and ‘feverish’.
Despite the extreme heat, he felt cold. As if with great effort, almost involuntarily, urged on by an inner desire, he began scrutinizing everything around him, as though searching desperately for something to distract him. But this failed to work, and he constantly fell into a reverie.
This has me thinking about trauma again. It feels like there’s something in his past that he doesn’t want to think about, and his seeking distractions is how he avoids that. This whole plan of murder is an avoidance technique, a way of externalising his pain into something else.
We’re off now over the Tuchkov Bridge to the Vasilyevsky Island in the delta of the River Neva, west of the city. This is where the wealthy had their dachas, away from the heat and dust of the city. He has a pie and a glass of vodka, then gets tired and falls asleep on the grass. This is when Raskolnikov has a terrible, vivid dream about a horse’s being beaten to death by peasants. It’s graphic and brutal. This dream comes from one of Dostoevsky’s own memories from his childhood and could give a glimpse into the trauma idea that I find so fascinating. Trauma has a way of bubbling up in dreams.
He wakes up and is immediately struck by how awful his idea of murdering this pawnbroker really was and decides with some relief that he’s not going to go through with it.
Freedom, freedom! He was no free from the charmed spell, the sorcery and the delusion!
But then fate steps in and we get another of those telegraphed messages from the future, telling us that ‘whenever he recalled everything that took place during that period of his life—minute by minute, point by point, detail by detail—he was struck, in an almost superstitious way, by one particular circumstance. It may not have been anything especially unusual, but later he was always to regard it as a turning point in determining his future fate.’
He goes home by a longer route than was his habit, but can’t say why he did that. He overhears a conversation that reveals to him that Lizaveta, the pawnbroker’s sister, will be out of her apartment the following evening and that Alyona Ivanovna will be home alone. After he’d decided not to go through with the murder, fate has now put this information his way and he feels pulled towards going through with it.
Translation Points
I’ve selected the fatalistic quotation as it feels like such a turning point for Raskolnikov.
He was only a few steps from his room. He went in like someone condemned to death. His mind was blank, and he was incapable of thinking anything at all. He suddenly felt with his entire being that he had lost the ability to think or act of his own free will, and that everything had been suddenly and irrevocably decided for him.
The other seven translations are in the comparison spreadsheet.
Zohar Lazar Illustrations
Zohar Lazar illustrated the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition and chose the horse dream scene for the back cover. This scanned image is from Classic Penguin: Cover to Cover, ISBN 978-0-14-311013-2.
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I'm already behind schedule! I was away for a bit to visit family abroad. But I'm going to catch up asap.