Later, after his five days spent in his room sleeping and in a delirium, when Raskolnikov puts on his new set of clothes and goes out walking through Petersburg at night, he is no longer acting as intentionally as a murderer should. His talk with people in the street is loose and unordinary. When he blurts out to the police clerk Zametov in the restaurant, “And what if it was I who murdered the old woman and Lizaveta?” he reveals that he is not fully in control of himself. He is now accident prone. As he leaves the restaurant, he “stumbled against Razumihin on the steps. They did not see each other till they almost knocked against one another.” He does not want to be with his friend. They talk back and forth and he breaks free from his company. He stops on a bridge and while looking at the setting sun and the dark water of the river, he accidentally views an intentional act of a woman in despair. She jumps off the bridge. She is pulled out of the water but Raskolnikov looks on “with a strange sense of indifference and apathy. He felt disgusted.” He leaves the river and walks towards the police station to “make an end” but on his way, he “turned into a side street and went two streets out of his way, possibly without any object, or possibly to delay a minute and gain time.” This accidental or intentional change of direction takes him to “the very gate of the house”. He goes in and up to the fourth floor and enters again the apartment, the scene of the crime. Does he return accidentally or intentionally? It is difficult to say but in any case it is a nice play between the accidental and the intentional if he returns by accident to the place of the murder that he committed intentionally. However when he leaves the house, he does have a very clear intention “for he had fully made up his mind to go to the police station and knew that it would all soon be over”. But on his way, he sees a crowd forming and went up to it. There has been an accident!

An accident that brings him once again accidentally into the world of the madman Marmeladov. A carriage has run over him. Only Raskolnikov knows his identity and his address. Marmeladov is so extremely wounded that Raskolnikov urges the police to call for a doctor and help him carry the injured man who is near death to his residence that is nearby. He shouts that he will pay the expenses. At the room of his wife, Katerina Ivanova, it is revealed by the doctor who examines Marmeladov that there is no hope. Marmeladov dies ten minutes later. His wife has sent her daughter Polenka, a child of eleven, to run to her stepsister’s residence. Marmeladov’s daughter Sonya arrives. Her father is able to raise himself up a little and beg her forgiveness. He dies embracing her. Raskolnikov confesses to Katerina Ivanova that Marmeladov was his friend. He gives the impoverished widow all the money he has, twenty roubles, and leaves.

The appearance of Sonya, “a small thin girl of eighteen with fair hair, rather pretty, with wonderful blue eyes” is a miracle. Or rather, her accidental appearance in Raskolnikov’s life gives him the opportunity, as we will see, of perceiving later when he gets to know her that a miracle, a miraculous indescribable something lives within her that is a source to her of divine strength. For the present however she does communicate something to Raskolnikov by her unexpected action that touches him deeply, something that can be described truly, given the absurd rational intentionality of our axe murderer, as a miraculous influence. As Raskolnikov is leaving the building and on the last steps, Polenka, the eleven-year-old stepsister of Sonya, calls after him to wait. Sonya has sent her after him to find out his name and where he lives.“Who sent you?” asks Raskolnikov. “‘Sister Sonya sent me,’ answered the girl, smiling…brightly.” “I knew it was sister Sonya sent you,” says Raskolnikov. “Mamma sent me too…when sister Sonya was sending me, mamma came up too and said, ‘Run fast, Polenka’” “Do you love sister Sonya?” asks Raskolnikov. “ ‘I love her more than anyone,’ Polenka answered with a peculiar earnestness, and her smile became graver.” “And will you love me?”, asks Raskolnikov.