Porfiry Petrovich is investigating the murder case of the moneylender Alena Ivanovna and her sister Lizaveta. Razumikhin was the first to bring Raskolnikov (at his own request—he said he was also a pawnholder for the old woman and wanted to get his watch back...) to the investigator’s apartment: “Porfiry Petrovich was at home, in a robe, in very clean underwear, and worn-out shoes. He was a man about thirty-five years old, shorter than average height, plump and even with a belly, clean-shaven, without a mustache or sideburns, with closely cropped hair on a large round head, somehow especially rounded at the back.” Porfiry Petrovich likes to pretend, is prone to provocative deceptions and mystifications: Razumikhin told Raskolnikov how the bailiff suddenly pretended in a conversation-argument to support the theory that the environment is always to blame for the crime, although he himself stands for the moral and legal responsibility of the criminal; then suddenly he would declare himself a fiancé and dress in a “new dress,” although later it turned out that it was because of the new outfit that they decided to joke with acquaintances and friends.

This Jesuit investigator said this at their very first meeting regarding Raskolnikov’s article “On Crime,” which he had read two months before the murder of the moneylender in the newspaper “Periodic Speech”—the author himself did not know about this publication, considering the article lost. In the end, Porfiry Petrovich drives Raskolnikov to a nervous breakdown and confession with such surprises, traps, hints, and mocking irony. At the last moment, the intricacies were almost torn apart by the simple-minded Mikolka Dementyev, who took the blame on himself, but Porfiry Petrovich untangles and resolves this misunderstanding and forces Raskolnikov to “turn himself in.”

Porfiry Petrovich is the only main character in Crime and Punishment without a surname, which seems to emphasize, on the one hand, his isolation in the novel and, to some extent, his mystery and secrecy, and on the other hand—the intimacy and “homeliness” of Porfiry’s portrayal, conducting the investigation without leaving his apartment. The novel indicates that Raskolnikov’s dwelling is separated from the police station by “a quarter of a verst”; to get there, the hero crosses a bridge, then goes straight and turns left. On the map of St. Petersburg drawn up in 1849 and in the city directory of 1862, there is a police station located at: Bolshaya Podyacheskaya, 26. Nikolai Antsiferov and Evgenia Sarukhanyan believed that the hero’s path led precisely to this building. At the same time, some researchers named another address—they justified their opinion by the fact that the apartment where Dostoevsky worked on the novel in the mid-1860s “belonged to the 3rd quarter of the 2nd police district,” and the corresponding station “was located in house 67 on Ekaterininsky Canal.”

Sources:

https://profilbaru.com/ru/Преступление_и_наказание