Horse

The horse appears in the novel as a working animal exposed to human use and cruelty, and most powerfully as the beaten mare in Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov’s dream. Her killing turns a remembered childhood scene into an encounter with violence that Raskolnikov cannot accept as entertainment or property damage: he runs to the mare, embraces her dead head, and tries to attack Mikolka.

Appearance and Narrative Context

Before the dream, a heavy dray horse pulls a huge wagon through the streets of Saint Petersburg, carrying a drunken man who shouts at Raskolnikov. The passing horse belongs to the everyday traffic of a crowded city near Hay Market, where work animals and people move through the same streets. The scene also precedes Raskolnikov’s sudden alarm at his conspicuous, battered hat, which he fears could compromise his plan. In this brief appearance, the horse is part of the ordinary street world; in the dream that follows, the animal’s suffering takes over the narrative and becomes impossible to treat as background.

The Mare in the Childhood Dream

The dream returns Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov to the little town where he was born, when he is about seven and walking with his father on a holiday evening. The country is flat and bare, and the road passes a tavern that had frightened him in childhood with its crowds, drunken shouting, singing, and fights. Beyond it lies the graveyard and the church where his parents took him to services for his dead grandmother. This remembered route places the mare’s suffering between two sharply different worlds: the tavern’s public disorder and the graveyard’s family rituals of reverence and remembrance.

The dream’s violence begins by violating the boy’s familiar understanding of working horses. He had liked watching the great cart-horses draw heavy loads at a slow, even pace, as if the burden made their work easier. He had also seen small peasant nags straining under wood or hay, especially when their wheels were trapped in mud or a rut. Those animals, beaten on the nose and around the eyes, had already called forth his pity; his mother used to take him away from the window when he could hardly bear to watch. The dream turns that earlier distress into a scene from which he cannot be removed.

At the tavern, a festive crowd gathers around a cart built for heavy draught horses, but its shafts hold a thin little sorrel mare. The mismatch between the animal’s slight body and the cart’s capacity becomes the scene’s governing fact. Drunken men crowd aboard, including a fat, rosy-cheeked woman in red cotton, while two young men ready their whips. The mare strains to start, but can scarcely move; she gasps and recoils as blows fall on her, while the people laugh at her failure to gallop under the load. The crowd treats the impossible demand as a joke, and Mikolka’s anger converts the joke into escalating punishment.

For the child, the crowd’s amusement cannot make the mare’s pain harmless. He calls to his father in alarm, breaks away when his father tries to lead him off, and runs toward the animal as she falters, stops, and tries again. His father dismisses the gathering as drunken foolishness and urges him not to look, but the boy’s attention remains fixed on the mare. The dream thus makes the difference between witnessing and turning away part of the action: the adults around him can explain the scene away or join its spectacle, while his response is to approach the suffering animal.

Killing and the Child’s Response

As the mare struggles, the crowd’s laughter and the violence intensify together. Mikolka urges the men to hit her in the face and eyes; one of the men calls for a song, and the passengers sing while a woman continues cracking nuts and laughing. The mare is whipped across the eyes, and the child runs beside and in front of her, crying and unable to breathe freely through his distress. A man lashes him across the face, but he does not feel it. When a woman tries to pull him away, he tears himself free and returns to the mare, who is nearly spent but still kicks.

Mikolka then changes weapons. He throws down his whip, takes up a thick shaft from the cart, and raises it over the mare; when the crowd cries that he will crush or kill her, he discards the shaft, stoops into the cart, and picks up an iron crowbar. He strikes with it, and the mare staggers, sinks, and attempts to pull again before another swinging blow lands on her back and brings her down. At Mikolka’s command to finish her, drinkers seize whatever they can find—whips, sticks, and poles—and join the attack. Mikolka continues striking with the crowbar until the mare stretches out her head, draws a long breath, and dies.

The crowd’s response exposes the cruelty’s casual assumptions: one spectator admires the mare’s imminent collapse, another had called for an axe, and someone challenges why she would not gallop. Mikolka claims the dead mare as his property and brandishes the crowbar, while several voices condemn him as un-Christian. The child’s answer is physical rather than argumentative. He reaches the mare, puts his arms around her bleeding head, kisses her eyes and lips, then springs up and rushes at Mikolka with his fists. His father catches him and carries him away. Still sobbing, the boy asks why they killed the poor horse; the dream leaves his grief unresolved, set against the crowd’s laughter, the owner’s claim, and the mare’s death.

Narrative Significance

The horse’s two appearances establish a sharp shift in how the novel makes animal labor visible: the dray horse passes through the city as part of its ordinary traffic, while the dream refuses to leave the mare in the background of human activity. Her body is first assigned a task it cannot perform, then made the target of punishment for that failure. Against this reduction to usefulness, the child’s attention registers her strain and pain as realities in their own right. The crowd’s laughter and Mikolka’s claim of ownership cannot settle what the scene means; the boy’s grief exposes the distance between possessing an animal and recognizing its suffering. By dwelling on that suffering until the mare’s death, the dream makes cruelty neither incidental nor abstract, but something witnessed in the vulnerable body of a working creature.