Nastasya

Nastasya, the cook and only servant in Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov’s lodging house, appears in small but consequential domestic encounters. She moves between the neglected room where he shuts himself away and the kitchen that briefly becomes the setting for his attempted preparations. Her actions are ordinary—bringing tea, passing on a letter, hanging linen—but they place her at points where his isolation meets the household around him.

Position in the Household

The narration describes Nastasya as rather pleased by Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov’s withdrawn mood. She has largely stopped sweeping or tending his room, straying in with a broom only about once a week. His withdrawal is so pronounced that even the sight of a servant entering can irritate him, while he does not protest when meals from the landlady cease. The contrast is telling: the room’s disorder and his neglect of food mark his self-imposed separation, but Nastasya remains one of the few people who enters his immediate domestic space.

Practical Care and News

Nastasya wakes him after nine and brings tea. It is her own cracked teapot, filled with weak, stale tea, accompanied by two yellow lumps of sugar. When he offers her coins for a loaf and the cheapest sausage, she suggests cabbage soup instead, explaining that she had saved some from the previous day. Her assistance is modest and matter-of-fact, rather than a dramatic intervention: she offers what is at hand while he tries to arrange a bare meal.

She also tells him that a letter arrived the day before, when he was out. Nastasya cannot say who sent it, and adds that she paid the postman three kopecks of her own, asking Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov to repay her. The message brings an important piece of news into his room through an everyday exchange, with the small debt attached to it.

An Accidental Obstacle

Later, when Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov cautiously looks into the kitchen on his way to fetch an axe, he finds Nastasya there taking linen from a basket and hanging it on a line. She stops her work and watches him as he passes; he turns his eyes away and continues as though he has noticed nothing. Her presence means he cannot get the axe, and the interruption leaves him overwhelmed and humiliated. Nastasya does not knowingly oppose his design: she is occupied with laundry, and her effect on his plan comes from the collision between an ordinary household task and the secret action he has prepared. The scene makes her routine domestic presence consequential without giving her knowledge of his purpose.