In a dark room lit only by a candle, Sonya and Raskolnikov sit and talk. It is eleven at night. She is frightened by his unexpected visit at a late hour but happy to see him. He says that her stepmother, Katerina Ivanovna, used to beat her insinuating that the two have a bad relationship but Sonya explains that she loves her stepmother and that they are a close family. She expresses compassion for the sick woman with feeling as she speaks of the hardships of her life. Raskolnikov asks if she knew Lizaveta, the girl he murdered, and she answers that she did. As the talk goes on, he asks himself how she can live with such suffering, her own and her family’s. He paces up and down the room thinking for five minutes in silence. “His eyes were hard, feverish and piercing, his lips were twitching. All at once he bent down quickly and dropping to the ground, kissed her foot.” He explains that he has not bowed down to her but to “all the suffering of humanity”. He says after a few moments that “your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing”. He is now “almost in a frenzy”. “Tell me how this shame and degradation can exist in you side by side with other, opposite, holy feelings?” It appears that he is going in the direction of the soul. He can not resist trying to know how she can be such a good person and live such a foul life. He cried to himself, “How can she sit on the edge of the abyss of loathsomeness into which she is slipping…? Does she expect a miracle?”

“‘So you pray to God a great deal, Sonya?’ he asked her.

Sonya did not speak; he stood beside her waiting for an answer.

‘What should I be without god?’ she whispered rapidly, forcibly, glancing at him with suddenly flashing eyes, and squeezing his hand.

‘Ah, so that is it!’ he thought.

‘And what does God do for you?’ he asked, probing her further.

Sonya was silent for a long while, as though she could not answer. Her weak chest kept heaving with emotion.

‘Be silent! Don’t ask! You don’t deserve!’ she cried suddenly looking sternly and wrathfully at him.

‘That’s it, that’s it,’ he repeated to himself.

‘He does everything,’ she whispered quickly, looking down again.”

The conflict is the same throughout most of Dostoevsky’s works. It fascinates him to put side by side the angelic opposite the unholy, the good opposite the loathsome, faith opposite unbelief, the mystical opposite the rational. Usually there is somewhere a hint of a divine and miraculous world that flashes light very dimly towards his characters, a light that never quite reaches most of them, that never becomes a bright flash into their soul that might save them. Sonya is clearly an angel despite her profession and Raskolnikov is clearly a devil supported by the unrelenting power of the mind. They meet in a dark room lit only by a candle. Sonya’s soul is bright with love. Raskolnikov’s soul is a dark abyss and his mind a solid bridge above it.

Then a miracle takes place. Raskolnikov understands with his mind, objectively, that a secret divine presence is within Sonia. He accepts with his mind that God is alive within her protecting her even though he is unable or unwilling to jump across the gap between his mind and his soul, influenced by Sonya, to repent and to be saved. He asks himself, “What held her up – surely not depravity? All that infamy had obviously only touched her mechanically, not one drop of real depravity had penetrated to her heart; he saw that.” He noticed a book on the top of a chest of drawers as he paced up and down the room. He picks it up and sees that it is a copy of the New Testament. She reveals that Lizaveta, the murdered young woman, brought it to her. He asks her to read the story of Lazarus whom Jesus raised from the dead. She hardly dares to read it to him because she says he does not believe but he insists and she reads. “Raskolnikov saw in part why Sonya could not bring herself to read to him and the more he saw this, the more roughly and irritably he insisted on her doing so. He understood only too well how painful it was for her to betray and unveil all that was her