Dunya's Sacrifice — Crime and Punishment

Raskolnikov reads his mother's letter and decides instantly: Dunya will not marry Luzhin while he lives. What follows is not grief but prosecution. He mocks Luzhin's kindness in shipping their trunk while Dunya and Pulcheria ride in a sacking-covered cart and third class the rest of the way. He sees the marriage's future tone in every cheap detail and in Luzhin's belief that a wife raised in poverty should treat her husband as benefactor. Dunya would live on black bread before selling her soul for herself, he thinks, but for her brother she will sell everything, becoming casuist and Jesuit to call it duty.

He compares that bargain to Sonia Marmeladov's fate and swears he will not accept it, then attacks his own hypocrisy. What right has he to forbid anything while living on their borrowed pension and waiting ten years to save them? Something must be done now, or he must throw up life altogether. The secret thought he has nursed for a month returns, no longer a dream. It takes a new menacing shape. His head hammers. There is darkness before his eyes. He will not have Dunya's sacrifice, he will not have it, mother, so long as he is alive. Two years and a half he has known that Dunya can put up with a great deal, and now they have decided she can put up with Luzhin too. He looks for a seat on the K boulevard.

On the way he fixates on a drunken girl of about fifteen, dress torn as if dressed by a man's hands, collapsing on a bench while a plump dandy stalks her. Raskolnikov shouts Svidrigailov at the stranger, nearly brawls, and guides a policeman to see the setup. He gives twenty copecks for a cab home. Then revulsion flips him. Let them devour each other alive, he tells the constable. On the empty seat he imagines the girl's path through beatings, hospitals, and taverns, then hears society's consolation word percentage and asks whether Dunya is next.

Only then does he recall that he was heading to Razumihin, the warm, tough friend he has snubbed for months, and wonder what need pulled him there.