“‘Let me alone – let me alone all of you!’ Raskolnikov cried in a frenzy. ‘Will you ever leave off tormenting me? I am not afraid of you! I am not afraid of anyone, anyone now! Get away from me. I want to be alone, alone, alone!’”
Razumihin and Zossimov leave at once but strangely Raskolnikov left alone does not remain in his room alone. His defense of his sister with his stinging insult to the man she is engaged to marry is the first genuinely human experience he has had since the murders and it perhaps motivates him to leave his room and seek some contact with the world outside of his room and his mind. Dostoevsky must bring his character into the everyday world of normal men and women if he is to somehow bring him also towards the world of human remorse which is never discovered in the human mind relying only on itself for guidance.
He dresses in his new set of clothes that Razumihin has bought for him, puts his rubles and his kopecks in his pocket, and steps out into the Petersburg night. It is eight o’clock with the sun setting and he does not think where he is going. Thought now, for some reason, tortures him. He now feels “that everything must be changed ‘one way or another’”. We have suddenly left thought, the world of thought, and have begun taking steps towards the world of feeling. He walks toward the Hay Market. He comes to a young man with a barrel organ accompanying the singing of a girl of fifteen hoping to earn a few kopecks. Raskolnikov stops and listens among two or three listeners. He takes out a five kopeck piece and puts it in the girl’s hand. He is on the street and among people and the man who sliced an axe onto the head of Lizaveta who “only put up her empty left hand” touches the hand of a girl. It is a sign, a brief sign from Dostoevsky, that his character has taken the first step to the only world that counts because it is the only world that is real, the human world. Dostoevsky will never read any sign, any of the thousands of signs in the universe without and in the mind within, that lead anywhere “upward” and “beyond” mentally or physically, spiritually or scientifically. He will follow no sign unless it leads to a purely human step.
A middle-aged man is standing idly by Raskolnikov as they listen to the boy and girl singing to music from a street organ. Raskolnikov tries for human contact with a stranger. “ ‘I love to hear singing to a street organ,’ said Raskolnikov, and his manner seemed strangely out of keeping with the subject. ‘I like it on cold, dark, damp autumn evenings – they must be damp – when all the passers-by have pale green, sickly faces, or better still when wet snow is falling straight down, when there’s no wind – you know what I mean? And the street lamps shine through it…’” “‘I don’t know…Excuse me’, muttered the stranger, frightened by the question and Raskolnikov’s strange manner, and he crossed over to the other side of the street.”
Raskolnikov’s manner is now strange in a way different from what it was before. Before his manner was strange because of his silence and his need to be separate from people around him. Now his manner is strange because of the way he talks to people in his surroundings. His need to talk seems like perhaps the first steps from his former silent madness ruled by his mind towards the Marmeladov kind of madness that has its origin in human feeling. But in Dostoevsky’s understanding of psychology, the mind and the soul are enemies and neither show any mercy to the other until one gives in to the other and commits itself because of its defeat to be the other’s servant. Raskolnikov has felt a minor touch of compassion and pressed five kopecks into the hand of a girl. He has sent off words of feeling and poetry to the astonished ears of a stranger. Something is making him speak. What if this something continues to put pressure on him? What if it presses him not to just talk but to talk about it? He had but one thought earlier when he left his room. His complete thought was “that all