Pyotr Luzhin

Pyotr Luzhin is a wealthy businessman whose respectability masks a fundamental moral emptiness. He engages himself to Dounia Raskolnikova in what he conceives as a mutually beneficial arrangement—he gains a young woman of beauty and refinement who will owe him eternal gratitude for elevating her from poverty, while she gains financial security. His perspective reveals the corruption possible within supposedly respectable society: he sees Dounia Raskolnikova not as a person with her own integrity and rights, but as a commodity and a tool for his own gratification. His expectation that Dounia Raskolnikova will be subservient and beholden to him for the 'favor' of marriage demonstrates his fundamental contempt for her dignity.