Summary: Chapter I
Luzhin is in his room with Lebezyatnikov, a younger man
who is his roommate. Luzhin now realizes that his engagement with
Dunya is irrecoverably broken. He nurses a deep hatred for Raskolnikov,
and shivers to think of the money that he lost on deposits for their
newlywed home and furnishings. He fantasizes that if he had given
his fiancée and her mother more presents, they would not have broken the
engagement. Meanwhile, he and Lebezyatnikov have been invited to
the memorial dinner that Katerina Ivanovna, who lives in the same building,
is holding for Marmeladov. Lebezyatnikov is a pompous fool, though
Luzhin initially thought of him as a thoughtful young man who could
help him navigate the new political waves of liberalism, radicalism,
and nihilism washing over Russia. Luzhin invites Sonya to his room
and gives the embarrassed girl a ten-ruble note.
Summary: Chapter II
The narrator considers Katerina Ivanovna’s reasons for
spending more than half of the money given to them by Raskolnikov
on the memorial banquet and concludes that it is probably because
of her pride. Only Raskolnikov and the lowliest of the tenants,
who behave rudely, attend the affair. Katerina, who claims repeatedly
to be of a “noble, if not aristocratic,” family, hurls insults at
her low-class guests. Meanwhile, she appears increasingly unwell,
coughing up blood during the meal. She ends up fighting with her
landlady while her guests egg her on. In the middle of the fight,
Luzhin appears in the doorway and Katerina rushes to him.
Summary: Chapter III
Luzhin insultingly brushes Katerina aside as she implores
his protection from the landlady. Turning to Sonya, he accuses her
of stealing a one-hundred-ruble note. Sonya denies the theft. Katerina
becomes incensed at the insult to her stepdaughter and starts raving
against Luzhin and the landlady. To prove Sonya’s innocence, she
defiantly turns the girl’s pockets out and is shocked when a one-hundred-ruble
note falls out. Luzhin magnanimously agrees not to press charges.
To Luzhin’s horror, however, Lebezyatnikov appears and declares
that he saw Luzhin place the note in Sonya’s pocket earlier. Raskolnikov
then explains that Luzhin was probably trying to embarrass him about
his association with Sonya. Luzhin, faced with the complete ruin
of his plan, tries to extricate himself by maintaining his innocence
and insulting Lebezyatnikov and Raskolnikov. After Luzhin leaves,
the fight between Katerina and the landlady continues. In the end,
the Marmeladovs are evicted.
Summary: Chapter IV
Raskolnikov visits Sonya in her room. He tells her that
her family has been turned out of their building but urges her not
to go to help them. He confesses the murders to her. Sonya responds
with immense pity and promises to support Raskolnikov and not abandon
him. She is astonished when he tells her that his poverty was not the
motive. Rather, he says, “I was ambitious to become another Napoleon;
that was why I committed a murder.” He also confesses that he feels
detached from other people and believed, and perhaps still believes,
in his superiority over most other people. Sonya tells him that
he has been punished for turning away from God. He reiterates that
self-absorption fueled his actions, that he wished to prove that
he was somehow extraordinary and able to transgress the moral codes
that bind ordinary people. Sonya tells him that he must confess
his sins publicly for God to give him peace. At first he resists, but
he soon consents. Sonya promises to come to see him in prison and
support him. She gives him a pendant cross to wear, similar to the
one that she wears, saying that they will both bear their crosses. Just
then, Lebezyatnikov knocks at the door.
Analysis: Chapters I–IV
Luzhin’s profoundly materialistic and self-serving nature
is brought to the fore in this section. Obsessed with money and
material objects, he blames Dunya’s rejection of him on entirely
material motives, thinking that once she had the inheritance from
Marfa Petrovna, she and her mother no longer needed him. His plan
to frame Sonya solidifies his status as one of the novel’s villains.
His ploy is clumsy and mean-spirited, and, although he tries to
maintain his pride, it is clear that he will never regain Dunya’s
favor. After this scene, Luzhin disappears from the narrative, never
to return again, since he has played his last cards and been beaten.
Dunya is now completely free to turn her attention to Razumikhin,
the man whose rightness for her has been clear from the start.
Lebezyatnikov functions as a humorous and sarcastic caricature of
the pompous but stupid intellectual, a proverbial emperor with no
clothes. Even as he rushes to Sonya’s defense, Lebezyatnikov feels
the need to make little speeches about the ethics of private charity.
In depicting Lebezyatnikov as obsessed with intellectual fads and
unrealistic utopias, Dostoevsky criticizes the actual intellectual currents
that were sweeping Russia in the 1860s, such
as nihilism, and emphasizes how much more profound, albeit equally
misguided, Raskolnikov’s theories are.
