In the tavern a man over fifty with a look in his eyes “as though of intense feeling” and perhaps “of thought and intelligence” but also with “a gleam of something like madness” begins talking to Raskolnikov. He moves to a seat at his table to engage him in conversation. He is dressed slovenly and is bloated with drink. He has been drinking for five days and sleeping on hay barges at night on the Neva river. His madness however is real. It is not at all like Raskolnikov’s insanity of living as exclusively as possible in his mind. Marmeladov’s madness comes from living blind to any thought about his welfare. He has given up everything. He is out of his mind because he has thrown away all interest in any thought that might lead him to some kind of normalcy by thinking and acting rationally. His madness is the kind of Russian madness that Dostoevsky loved. It is the kind that bravely throws overboard completely, as completely as possible, the regular rational thoughts of the mind. Dostoevsky loved such madness. Madness has driven Marmeladov to give up working and providing for his wife, three young children and a daughter of eighteen. Instead he uses what money they might have used to ease their starvation for drink. Living only where you think, or at least living as best you can where you think, is profitable. It is positive. It produces results. Marmeladov mentions, as he begins a long description for Raskolnikov of his sufferings, most of them caused by himself, that a certain Mr. Lebeziatnikov “who keeps up with modern ideas” explained to him the other day “that compassion is forbidden nowadays by science itself, and that that’s what is done now in England, where there is political economy.” Compassion is forbidden by science itself and this produces political economy. Political economy, science and rational behavior rule the world outside the tavern and produce positive results but inside the tavern in a world hidden from the ordinary world, what is truly alive is Marmeladov’s madness, a madness that has its roots in the agony of remorse and human feelings caused by suffering.

Raskolnikov will carry out his idea. He will live ruled by an idea that will result in his murdering the old pawnbroker. His logic is that if one is forced to live where one thinks, then thought can produce an action totally devoid of human feeling. And if this is so, then even an extreme act like killing an old pawnbroker can be done without feeling. A human ruled completely by an extreme idea and willing to carry out the logic of his idea by a concrete action will become necessarily a human more than human, a superman. But testing this logic will happen in Raskolnikov’s future. For the present, in our tavern, Marmeladov relates to Raskolnikov an act carried out by his young eighteen-year-old daughter Sonya not because of an idea but by compassion. Compassion, feeling, in the case of Sonya motivates the idea and then the act and not the other way around whereby some inhuman idea produces an act.

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.