The Memorial Dinner — Crime and Punishment

Part V Chapter II is Katerina Ivanovna's memorial dinner for Marmeladov, a feast born of poor man's pride, consumption, and a disordered mind. Nearly ten of the twenty roubles Raskolnikov gave for the funeral are wasted on vodka, rum, poor wine, pancakes, and show. Respectable lodgers stay away; Luzhin and Lebeziatnikov do not come, though Katerina has boasted of Luzhin's nobility and pension promises. A frantic Polish lodger fetches everything; drunk guests include a waistcoatless commissariat clerk and strangers no one recognizes. Amalia Ivanovna lays the table with pride; Katerina resents her cap and later mocks her as an owl while blood stains her handkerchief from consumption. Children eat on a bench apart while Polenka tends them.

Raskolnikov arrives from the cemetery and becomes the educated guest of honour beside Katerina, who whispers scandal about the landlady, the spotty clerk, starving Poles, and missing genteel ladies. He eats only from politeness, tasting food she heaps on his plate, and watches Sonia grow more frightened as the evening curdles. Sonia brings Luzhin's polite apologies and promise of business help; Katerina flatters herself that a man of his standing could hardly sit in such extraordinary company except for devotion to her family. The room turns uglier: a drunken commissariat clerk roars over Marmeladov's drinking, gingerbread cock in his pocket for the children, and insults traded until guests egg him on against the widow. Someone sends Sonia black-bread hearts pierced with an arrow; Katerina calls the sender a drunken ass. Sonia knows the genteel ladies refused the invite because she is that young person they would not let a daughter sit beside.

Katerina raves about her colonel's daughter certificate, a future boarding-school in T, and Sonia's virtues, then bursts into tears when tea is proposed. Amalia Ivanovna lectures on die Wasche and novel-reading; Katerina calls it nonsense. Amalia Ivanovna's German anecdotes and poof-poof pantomime ignite a war of fathers: burgomeister versus colonel, slut versus lady, silver spoons snatched, children crying. When Amalia shouts about the yellow ticket, Katerina pushes Sonia aside and lunges for the landlady's cap. At that minute Pyotr Petrovitch Luzhin appears on the threshold, scanning the room with severe vigilant eyes as Katerina rushes to him, the man who sent Sonia ten roubles that morning and stayed away until the table was in ruins.

The chapter is the chaotic memorial feast, not Marmeladov's street death, not Raskolnikov's confession to Sonia, and not yet the hundred-rouble theft accusation, which continues in the next chapter when Luzhin finally acts inside the room. It ends on his entrance alone, not on Sonia cleared, defended, or publicly disgraced.