Dostoevsky rewrites Père Goriot’s deathbed scene, linking it to Marmeladov’s with several details—for example, Rastignac and Raskolnikov send for the doctors and provide for the funerals of the fathers; both deathbed scenes are illuminated by a single candle.

More important, while rewriting Balzac’s scene Dostoevsky inverts it through the relationship between the fathers and the daughters. Goriot, dying, calls out for his daughters—“Nasie! Fifine!”—but they don’t come, while Marmeladov’s daughter immediately runs to his bedside, where he cries out “Sonia! Daughter! Forgive me!” (p. 179). Goriot’s daughters don’t want to compromise their social positions by associating with their father. Marmeladov’s daughter, who has already compromised her own social position to maintain him and his second family, comes despite her shame at appearing at Amalia Fiodorovna’s apartment:

Sonia . . . looked about her bewildered, unconscious of everything. She forgot her fourth-hand, gaudy silk dress, so unseemly here with its ridiculous long train, and her immense crinoline that filled up the whole doorway, and her light-colored shoes, and the parasol she brought with her, though it was no use at night, and the absurd round straw hat with its flaring flame-colored feather (p. 177).

Dostoevsky’s detailed description of the prostitute’s finery that Sonia wears implicitly parodies Balzac’s elaborate depictions of Goriot’s daughters’ clothing, the expense of which contributes to their father’s ruin. Balzac’s suggestion that Goriot’s daughters are simply expensively kept prostitutes is inverted by Dostoevsky’s rendition of Sonia. She sacrifices herself out of love for her family, strengthened by her religious faith; her finery is so external to her spiritual nature and love for her family that she is able to forget about it entirely when she runs to her father’s deathbed.

This systematic similarity between the two novels highlights the conspicuous point of departure from Dostoevsky’s elaborate parallel: the character of Sonia, who is possibly the most important character for Dostoevsky’s underlying philosophy in Crime and Punishment. In Père Goriot her counterpart is Victorine, a devout, pale, “excessively slim” young woman who resembles a medieval statuette and whose eyes “express Christian gentleness and resignation.” But Dostoevsky combines Victorine with a stock character from French realist literature of the 1830s, the noble prostitute, to create a collision between opposites: “Sonia was a small thin girl of eighteen with fair hair” (p. 177), “very young, almost like a child . . . with a modest and refined manner” (p. 226), imbued with Christian faith—and a prostitute. Dostoevsky’s contrast goes beyond the shock effect to argue with all the French prostitute tales: Unlike the French prostitute stereotype, who usually comes to a gruesome end after some brief success in society, Sonia has found faith, strength, and love through suffering, loving others as herself, and reading the Bible. Dostoevsky gives us two examples of vulnerable females who are not ruined by prostitution, Dunia and Sonia. Faith is Sonia’s equivalent of Dunia’s pride; Sonia is Dostoevsky’s answer to Raskolnikov’s reasonable prediction that her young half-sister Polia will go that way, too: Spirit can overcome the environment and material reality. And her faith turns out to be rewarded through the most improbable means. Svidrigailov—the embodiment of faithlessness, cynicism, and amorality, who has himself been implicated in the seduction of a young girl—provides the means for the orphaned Polia’s maintenance.

In Père Goriot, the diabolic Vautrin proposes that Rastignac marry Victorine to make his fortune: Vautrin will have Victorine’s brother killed so that she will inherit millions—the equivalent of killing the mandarin. In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky recasts the social and monetary “salvation” that is to be attained through murder: Raskolnikov’s salvation is brought about not by killing his mandarin, the pawnbroker, as he seems to think it could be, but through his compassion and acceptance of suffering.

The Gospel of John

The character of Sonia is the point at which the French genre of the prostitute with a heart of gold intersects with the detective thriller in the tradition of Eugène Sue, whose descriptions of the underworld appeared in serial novels in French newspapers; through her, Dostoevsky rewrites both genres in order to reject their insistently materialist philosophy. Sonia plays the role of Jesus in the resurrection of Raskolnikov. He asks her to read him “the story of Lazarus,” and she tells him it is in “the fourth gospel,” the biblical Gospel of John (p. 310). Dostoevsky incorporates the Gospel of John as a hidden system of references in Crime and Punishment; indeed the novel may be understood as a kind of modern version of John.

Details along Raskolnikov’s path hint at an inverse parallel to the life of Jesus as told by John, for Raskolnikov wants to make himself into a God by giving himself the right to take human life. He commits the sin of which the Jews accuse Jesus when they say, “You, being a man, make yourself God” (John 10:33; English Standard Version). Raskolnikov does this by passing judgment on Aliona Ivanovna, claiming that he benefits mankind by ridding it of the pawnbroker.