Razumihin Returns — Crime and Punishment

Raskolnikov surfaces from days of fever with fractured memories: people plotting around him, Nastasya at the bedside, and the blank hole where the murders should be. At ten in the morning he wakes fully to find a merchant's messenger with thirty-five roubles from his mother, sent through Vahrushin. Razumihin bursts in, jokes that money is sweeter than treacle, and practically forces him to sign for it. Tchebarov, a business man, had taken the landlady's I O U because a mother with a hundred and twenty-five roubles pension and a sister in bondage could still be squeezed. Razumihin went security and stopped the whole affair. He feeds Raskolnikov soup and tea with bearish tenderness while Nastasya sets a clean table for the first time in a long while.

Razumihin explains how he tracked him through the address bureau and now knows everything: the landlady, the torn-up I O U he bought back from Tchebarov, Nikodim Fomitch, Ilya Petrovitch, and Zametov at the police office. Raskolnikov admits it was base to claim his mother would pay when she is nearly a beggar. When he asks what he raved in delirium, Razumihin lists bulldogs, earrings, chains, Krestovsky Island, porters, police names, and above all his sock, which he clutched for twenty-four hours while begging for fringe on his trousers. Raskolnikov turns cold at the name Zametov.

Alone, from some almost animal cunning, he conceals returning strength. He leaps from bed in panic: do they know yet? He checks the empty wall hole, the stove ashes, the dusty sock. Escape fantasies spin toward America until beer and exhaustion pull him under again.

In the evening Razumihin returns with a parcel: cap, trousers, boots, shirts, all bought with the mother's thirty-five roubles while Raskolnikov slept more than six hours in a quilt that replaced the ragged greatcoat. He changes the linen despite protests. When Raskolnikov finally asks what money bought the rig-out, Razumihin says his own, from Vahrushin, from his mother. It will be long before I get rid of them, Raskolnikov thinks, staring at the wall. The door opens and a tall stout man whose appearance seems familiar comes in.