Marmeladov’s daughter Sonya has gone out to the streets to earn money to feed her stepmother and her stepbrothers and stepsister. She even is so humble and self-sacrificing that she gives some of the money so fouly earned to her father to continue his five-day drunk. “He will pity us Who has had pity on all men,” Marmeladov says with genuine human feeling to young Raskolnikov sitting across the table in the tavern listening. “He will come in that day and he will ask: ‘Where is the daughter who gave herself for her cross, consumptive stepmother, and for the little children of another? Where is the daughter who had pity on the filthy drunkard, her earthly father, undismayed by his beastliness?’ And He will say, ‘Come to me! I have already forgiven thee once…I have forgiven thee once… Thy sins which are many are forgiven thee for thou hast loved much…’ And he will forgive my Sonya, He will forgive, I know it…I felt it in my heart when I was with her just now!” But Dostoevsky does not end Marmeladov’s passionate words here. He does not let those who live by rationality and without compassion and have achieved “political economy” slip away without throwing them a punch. For as he continues his passionate outpouring of his feelings Marmeladov speaks of what will be said at the final judgment to “the wise ones and those of understanding” and he explains why the meek and the humble and weak will be accepted by Him. “This is why I receive them, o ye wise,” Marmeladov goes on with feeling, “this is why I receive them, o ye of understanding, that not one of them believed himself to be worthy of this.”

Two days later, Raskolnikov will hammer the blunt backside of an axe onto the head of a sixty-year-old woman, a pawnbroker, killing her. A few moments after the murder, while he searches in the dead woman’s bedroom for valuables, the pawnbroker’s half-sister, Lizaveta, comes in the main room of the apartment and discovers the dead body of her half-sister on the floor bloodied. Raskolnikov already knows about Lizaveta and she knows a little about him from the comings and goings of people in that area of the city. Dostoevsky describes her, “She was a single woman of about thirty-five, tall, clumsy, timid, submissive and almost idiotic. She was a complete slave and went in fear and trembling of her sister, who made her work day and night, and even beat her.” Lizaveta sees the dead body on the floor and then Raskolnikov comes out of the bedroom. “And this hapless Lizaveta was so simple and had been so thoroughly crushed and scared that she did not even raise a hand to guard her face, though that was the most necessary and natural action at the moment, for the axe was raised above her face. She only put up her empty left hand, but not to her face, slowly holding it out before her as though motioning him away. The axe fell with the sharp edge just on the skull and split at one blow all the top of the head.”

What can be done with such people? Isn’t the logic directing Raskolnikov’s act reasonable? Does an old woman, a pawnbroker scratching out a living for herself on the poverty and misery of the poor, deserve to live? Of course everyone knows what is evil and what is good and she should absolutely not be murdered with a blow on her head from an axe, but isn’t it more or less necessary to murder her some way or another? What role can she play in society except to live a miserable life? Isn’t misery itself a kind of murder, a slow murder of the poor by those who possess riches and live a higher form of life enlightened by reason? And the hapless Lizaveta, simple and meek and crushed by the burden of living, what can society do with her except find some way to get rid of her, not murder her but at least keep her out of sight somewhere so that enlightened people don’t come in contact with her disgraceful poverty? Besides, it was an accident that caused her death. She happened to walk into the scene of her half-sister’s murder and confront by accident her killer. Raskolnikov was forced by circumstances to kill her too. Circumstances and chance kill the poor all the time. To be unlucky is disgraceful and all the poor are unlucky. They are incapable of living rationally, of making real progress. They don’t think in the proper manner about their actions before they take action. They deserve their fate. In fact, from a larger point of view, the poor are necessary in order to give higher meaning to the lives of the rich and successful. The enlightenment of the mind is a necessary development that superior people seek caused partly by their observation of the miserable lives of the poor. Raskolnikov is an instrument of bourgeois society. He took a drastic step upward to enlightenment by ridding society of two beings whom society in a civilized manner was getting rid of anyway.

The only thing Raskolnikov cares about after the double murder is himself. Two men come to the door of the pawnbroker’s apartment. When the bell of the apartment tinkles and then someone begins banging loudly on the door, he has no thought at all of the two dead women near him on the floor. A giddiness comes over him but when a voice on the other side of the door calls out loudly to the pawnbroker, he recovers himself. He thinks and thinks and thinks again of how to escape. He sneaks out to the street unobserved aided by his reason now alive and vital and dynamic. It has become a strange delight for him to now exist safely only by thinking and to be isolated now in a state of supreme detachment from any connection with people he now passes on the street. He is no longer like those around him. He alone counts. His safety, his defiance of all regular habits, his criminal state, this alone now makes Raskolnikov Raskolnikov.

At any moment society can reach out and grasp him like some scared chicken running around a farmyard unless he pretends successfully to be like everyone else. Only his mind is of any use in this new exhilarating drama. He must make himself as enlightened as possible. He is like an actor in a theater separated from the public before him and feeling strangely and magically alive even though his every word and his every act is counterfeited and false. He must be a light shining in the darkness of a society now totally alien to him but a light visible only to himself. Remorse? It does not exist and can not exist in him because his state of criminality must have no influence at all coming from the soul if he is to exist successfully and safely. The problem of the Russian soul no longer exists for Raskolnikov. He is not divided anymore by the influences that drive the soul inwardly or outwardly. He is condemned by his criminal act to live only where he thinks and it excites him to live there with a strange delight that grows more delightful as he escapes again and again from normal humans who are all now his enemies.

Raskolnikov has now reached, in a strange and unique fashion, the pinnacle of Western European religious and intellectual culture. His mind produced the thoughts that led to his crime but it observed his crime with perfect indifference just as it does all human actions. He can no longer live ever again as a normal human unless the unthinkable happens and he breaks the connection with his mind that his thinking produces. In order to experience remorse for what he has done, he would have to reach a place in his soul where a mysterious voice that has nothing to do with his mind and his thoughts cries out to him passionately that he should not have done it. This is impossible. Remorse is a form of compassion, a kind of compassion that a person feels for himself, a compassion of regret for a wrong he has committed. Modern European science, according to what a man has told Marmeladov, forbids compassion and successful enlightened modern Europeans have forbidden themselves not only compassion but remorse for the sufferings and injuries they inflict on the poor. Dostoevsky resists any attempt on his part to direct his hero towards remorse and instead directs him to imprison himself in his own mind more and more intensely even when influences caused by compassion for him by others should move him towards remorse. Dostoevsky is not out to convert Raskolnikov to the truths of the soul. He has driven Raskolnikov’s self so deeply into his mind that there is no place within him anymore for a soul. He does have moments when he is moved by compassion for the poor and he has other emotional moments, especially moments of fear, but these are fleeting moments.