Part 6, Chapter 1 — the fog

A strange period begins for Raskolnikov. The chapter opens with the narrator looking back on it. For some days after Katerina Ivanovna's death he was, by his own later account, in a kind of fog. He did not go to Sonya's. He did not go to his mother's. He sat in the garret. He walked the streets. He could not afterwards say what he had been thinking about. He had not yet decided to go to the police. He had not yet decided not to.

Razumikhin appears at the garret in the late afternoon of one of these days. He is uncharacteristically grim. He has come from Pulcheria Alexandrovna's lodgings. Pulcheria Alexandrovna is in despair: her son has not visited in three days; she does not know what to think. Dunya, more practically, has received a letter — the bearer was a porter from the canal, the sender unnamed — that has disturbed her. She has not shown it to her mother. Razumikhin demands to know what Raskolnikov knows. He says he has begun to suspect his friend of something he cannot bring himself to name. Raskolnikov refuses. He tells Razumikhin he can give him nothing today. He asks him to take care of his mother and sister; to marry Dunya, if she will have him; to be the brother Raskolnikov has not been. Razumikhin, hearing a valediction in this, leaves without answering.

Raskolnikov realizes the letter to Dunya must have been from Svidrigailov. He had been waiting for some such move. He puts on his coat. He goes out to walk to Svidrigailov's rooms — and stops on the way, on impulse, at Porfiry's. The chapter ends as he climbs the staircase to the magistrate's flat for the third time.