Svidrigailov's Last Night — Crime and Punishment

Part VI Chapter VI is Svidrigaïlov's last night after Dunya's revolver, not Raskolnikov's confession to Porfiry or the Siberia march. He drifts through low haunts until ten, treats Katia and crooked-nosed clerks, pays for a pleasure garden Vauxhall, listens to clerks shout over a stolen teaspoon he buys off, drinks no wine, and walks home drenched when the storm breaks. He tears papers, takes his money, and visits Sonia while the Kapernaumov children flee: he may go to America, leaves orphan receipts and three thousand roubles in bonds for her alone, and warns that Rodion Romanovitch faces a bullet in the brain or Siberia, so she will need the money if she follows him. He praises her advice to confess, tells her to hide the cash with Razumihin later, forbids mention of his visit, and sends greetings Razumihin must repeat, then vanishes into the rain.

At twenty past eleven he wakes his betrothed's family on Vassilyevsky Island, charms the sensible mother with talk of Paris, and presses fifteen thousand roubles on the girl before kissing her cheek and leaving the gift locked away while the mother whispers that Englishmen are eccentric. Near midnight he crosses the bridge, shivers at the black Little Neva, and beds down in the Adrianople hotel under the stairs. Fever, tea and veal untouched, mice under the blanket, and memories of Dunya with the lowered revolver give way to a nightmare Trinity coffin of a drowned fourteen-year-old, then listening to a drunk next door, a wet child in the corridor whom he undresses and warms until a depraved harlot dream makes him cry Accursed child and wake at daylight with Dunya's revolver still in his pocket.

He writes a few lines in his notebook in large letters, fails to catch flies on the untouched veal, and walks through milky mist toward the flooded river, picturing Petrovsky Island bushes but rejecting them for a witness. He passes a drunk in the street, reads shop signs, and turns into the street with the big stone house and tower. Achilles the sentry in a copper helmet asks what do you want here; Svidrigaïlov jokes about foreign parts, cocks Dunya's revolver, says he was going to America, puts it to his right temple while Achilles cries it is not the place, and pulled the trigger. Svidrigaïlov's parallel menace ends here; Raskolnikov still wanders God knows where before visiting his mother in Part VI Chapter VII. This is not Porfiry's mercy speech, Sonia's public crossroads command, or the epilogue convoy east.