Perhaps the most horrifying chapter in Crime and Punishment, the death of Svidrigailov

It's kind of odd that in some of the last chapters of Crime and Punishment F Dostoyevsky shifts the focus from the murderer, Raskolnikov, to the secondary character Svidrigailov (sp?), who was introduced late in the novel and plays a somewhat minor role: He has tried to seduce R's sister, Dunya, who'd worked in his household as a maid, and has now followed D and her family to St. Petersberg. Odd as the new focus on S may be, FD gives us some terrific chapters about S and his demise: After lengthy dinner meeting w/ R at which S tries to convince D that he's a good and generous guy - and in which he describes his perverse pursuit of women and of a new wife - even pursuing an engagement to a 16-year-old girl (he's 50!), whose family welcomes his advances because he's rich - S meets w/ D and tells her that her brother is guilty of the murder of the pawnbroker and her sister. Dunya is horrified; S threatens her and says that he's pay to get her brother and her family out of the country if she'll have sex with him. She pulls a pistol from her purse and shoots at him twice, but it's only a grazing wound. He at first refuses to let her from from this locked room, but he relents. Overcome w/ some kind of remorse, S goes out into the night and finds Sonya and her family and gives them a great deal of money to pay for housing and education for the newly orphaned children. Having done this good deed, he roams the city streets through the night - this is perhaps the most harrowing chapter in the entire novel - and winds up at a decrepit hotel, where he checks in for the night, spends a horrible night tormented by vermin and mysterious cries, has a horrifying dream about rescuing a child, or perhaps abusing the child?, and wanders into the dawn where he approaches a man (a Jewish man - why is that so significant to FD?) and shoots himself in the head. After that, the focus goes back to the protagonist, R., in a horrifying scene where he says good-bye to his mother, without telling her why he is leaving or where he is headed, and then a final meeting w/ sister, Dunya. Oddly, the inspector Porfiry, who'd nailed the case against R, more or less has dropped from the novel at this point, as noted in the intro to the Everyman edition; it's as if we're now completely in the minds of the main characters and the institutions of state and justice no longer seem to matter; we've moved as far as possible beyond the police procedural.