Pyotr Petrovich Quotes

And, beginning to grind his teeth again, Pyotr Petrovich admitted that he'd been a fool--but only to himself, of course.

He knows his lines!' said Raskolnikov suddenly. 'I'm sorry?' asked Pyotr Petrovich, unsure of what had been said. He received no reply. 'All perfectly reasonable,' Zosimov hastened to put in. 'Isn't it, though?' Pyotr Petrovich went on, glancing with satisfaction at Zosimov. 'Wouldn't you agree,' he continued, addressing Razumikhin, but with a new, triumphant note of superiority, to the point that he very nearly added 'young man' [...]

The one quality his negative characters share, and almost the only negative his world view allows, is inner fixity, a sort of death-in-life, which can take many forms and tonalities, from the broadly comic to the tragic, from the mechanical to the corpselike, from Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin to Nikolai Stavrogin. Inner movement, on the other hand, is always a condition of spiritual good, though it may also be a source of suffering, division, disharmony, in this life. What moves may always rise. Dostoevsky never portrays the completion of this movement; it extends beyond the end of the given book. We see it in characters like Raskolnikov and Mitya Karamazov, but first of all in the man from underground.