Part 2, Chapter 5 — Luzhin's first visit

A new visitor knocks. He is portly, cautious, sour-faced, well-dressed for the slum street he has just walked up. He introduces himself as Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin, court counsellor — Dunya's fiancé. He has come to introduce himself to his future brother-in-law. He cannot quite hide his disgust at the room but composes himself into forbearing courtesy and seats himself.

He delivers, with self-satisfied pleasure, a small lecture on the latest progressive ideas, drawn from the new economic literature. The doctrine is rational self-interest. One should love oneself before one loves one's neighbor; only the well-loved self is in a position to give. The old morality of self-sacrifice and Christian charity produces only a torn and useless single garment shared between two beggars; the new morality of rational self-interest produces a hundred whole garments. Society advances by way of self-love. Razumikhin attacks the doctrine on its terms. Raskolnikov, on the sofa, recognizes a near-relative of his own theory in someone he despises. He breaks in. If self-interest is the engine of all good, he says quietly, then on your principles I should be permitted, in the right circumstances, to cut a man's throat. Luzhin reddens; he denies the implication; the argument deepens.

Within minutes Luzhin has been so thoroughly humiliated, and has so completely lost his composure, that he stands up to leave. He attempts a parting threat about the engagement; Raskolnikov tells him to get out and never come back; Luzhin walks out fuming. The marriage, in Raskolnikov's mind, is broken in this scene. The encounter has planted the novel's first explicit double: Luzhin's theory of self-interest is Raskolnikov's theory in a different costume, and Raskolnikov has just heard himself in another man's mouth and was unable to listen without rage.