The Dream of the Mare — Crime and Punishment

Raskolnikov catches himself planning a visit to Razumihin not today but on the day after It, when everything will begin afresh. The thought shocks him awake. He jumps from the bench, wanders the city in fever, counts his last thirty copecks, drinks vodka in a tavern, and falls asleep in the bushes on Petrovsky Ostrov.

His dream returns him to childhood, walking with his father past a rowdy tavern toward the graveyard. Drunken Mikolka hitches a broken mare to an oversized cart and whips her while the crowd laughs. The boy runs to the horse, sees blows land across her eyes, and kisses the dead mare's bleeding head when she collapses under shaft and crowbar. His father says the peasants are drunk and brutal and that it is not their business. The child wakes gasping.

Horrified, Raskolnikov asks whether he could really take an axe to a woman's skull. He insists he could never do it, prays to renounce that accursed dream, and crosses the bridge whispering Freedom, freedom. Then, without reason, he routes through the Hay Market and overhears a huckster tell Lizaveta to come tomorrow at seven, when her sister will be alone. He goes home like a man condemned, feeling everything suddenly and irrevocably decided.