Sonya has once lived with Marmeladov and her stepmother, Katerina Ivanova, and her two stepbrothers and stepsister in one room in extreme poverty. They were starving because of Marmeladov’s failings and in a rage caused by her extreme sufferings, Katerina Ivanova drove her pure and meek eighteen-year-old stepdaughter Sonya, who can find no legitimate work, to begin selling herself on the streets of Petersburg. In the tavern other men, listening to Marmeladov’s conversation with Raskolnikov, laugh from time to time at what he relates. But when he speaks with deep feeling about what will be the ultimate fate of his daughter, strangely those listening are moved. But before we hear what Marmeladov says, inspired by religion, we should examine Dostoevsky’s general point of view.
For Dostoevsky Raskolnikov, dressed carelessly, brooding alone day after day in his room barely bigger than a closet, eating little, avoiding human contact, despising the life going on around him, is a pastiche, carried to an absurd degree, of an eastern holy man. He wants to go beyond the life around him by using his mind so exclusively that he loses touch with regular life. He denies life to find life like some eastern holy man and this direction for Dostoevsky leads to nothing, to a transcendence of normal life that is empty and worthless and destructive. For Dostoevsky, all of Western European culture goes in this direction. The mind dictates in Europe how life should be lived. It is the source of truth and goodness. Even refined poetic and aesthetic experience is fashioned into cultural objects by the mind and all scientific and mathematical products are always the result of rational thinking. The Western European ideal of blessedness is the state of the perfectly indifferent mind thinking about itself. Thinkers like Aristotle and Plato and others in the ancient world along with medieval European scholastic thinkers of the Catholic Church as well as renaissance thinkers down to the rule in Dostoevsky’s time of European thinkers who exclude experience that does not fit within the boundaries of bourgeois rationalism have fallen all of them into the mind’s fatal trap. European thought has led Europeans to live in the categories where they think. Dostoevsky will have none of it. For him Raskolnikov is searching for a separate superior state of being that does not exist except as an illusion created by the power of his mind. Only Marmeladov’s madness can lead to real spirituality because it is profoundly human.