Luzhin Frames Sonia — Crime and Punishment

Part V Chapter III continues the memorial dinner where Luzhin enters after Katerina's brawl with Amalia. He waves off her plea for protection, denies knowing her father, and turns to Sonia with a businesslike accusation: a hundred-rouble note is missing from his table after her morning visit. He rehearses bonds, counting, the ten-rouble gift, her embarrassment at his invitation through Lebeziatnikov, and compels the room to witness that he accuses her with cruel justice because she repaid his charity with ingratitude. Lebeziatnikov stands in the doorway listening. Sonia, pale, whispers that she has taken nothing and offers back the ten roubles from her handkerchief. Luzhin threatens the police; Amalia Ivanovna calls her thief.

Katerina flies at him, snatches the ten-rouble note and throws it in his face; turning Sonia's pockets inside out seems to vindicate her until a folded paper falls from the right pocket and Luzhin holds up a hundred-rouble note folded in eight for all to see. Amalia cries thief; Sonia collapses in horror. Katerina's wail defends her: yellow passport, starving children, Sonia who would sell her last rag. Luzhin plays compassion while eyeing Raskolnikov's burning hatred. Then Lebeziatnikov, who listened from the doorway, strides in: you are a slanderer. He swears he saw Luzhin slip the note into Sonia's pocket at the door with his left hand while shaking her right, having noticed Luzhin palm the hundred when he changed the ten.

Luzhin turns grey; the room believes the witness. Raskolnikov explains the motive: revenge after Dunya's rupture, the letter slandering Sonia, yesterday's quarrel when he drove Luzhin out and declared Sonia worth more than him, the wish to separate him from mother and sister by proving his betrothed's defender a thief. That was what he was working for. Murmurs, Polish shouts of scoundrel, Luzhin's bluster about atheist slanderers fails; Amalia orders him from the lodgings. He flees after a commissariat clerk's glass hits her instead of him. Sonia weeps despite vindication, feeling the wrong done to her helplessness; Katerina is evicted on the funeral day, hurls Marmeladov's green shawl over her shoulders, and runs into the street seeking justice while Polenka waits on the trunk with the little ones. Amalia rages; lodgers sing and quarrel. Raskolnikov leaves thinking it is time for me to go to Sonia's lodgings to hear what she will say now.

The chapter is Luzhin's planted-money frame-up exposed, not Porfiry's private trap or voluntary confession to Sonia. Lebeziatnikov and Raskolnikov undo the scheme; the lodgers' room ends in expulsion and chaos while the axe murderer walks toward Sonia for the next reckoning.