Raskolnikov's increasingly bizarre behavior in Crime and Punishment

In Part 2 of F Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment the protagonist, Raskolnikov, engages in increasingly bizarre and self-destructive behavior as he is tormented by his guilt and shame over his murder of the elderly pawnbroker and her daughter, Lizaveta. As he recovers from a fever and delirium after the murder, which his friends assume is just some kind of three-day fever, he hears various men who come to his sick-room as they discuss the murder and the status of the investigation (the police had held for a time the two men who reported the death; at present they're holding one of the men who was painting an apartment in the same building). R's friends expound w/ their opinions on the investigation, more or less decisively proving that the men the police held or are holding could have possibly been the killer. R is at several points on the verge of confessing to the crime; in fact, at one point he provocatively tells one of his acquaintances, whom he has run into at a tavern, that he committed the murder - which his friend believes is a perverse joke of some sort. R's bizarre behavior culminates w/ a visit to the crime scene; he actually lets himself into the apartment where he'd killed the 2 women and he pokes around while two painters wrap up their work for the day (actually, it seems to be pretty late at night). In other words, R is playing with fire, seeing how close he can get his hand to the flame and how long he can hold it in place. Meanwhile, he's finally met Luzhin, his sister's fiance, and as he'd determined earlier he's hostile and rude to the man, not that Luzhin didn't deserve such treatment. R's best friend, Razumikhin, keeps trying to save R from his worst instincts, but without much luck - he's the kind of friend Hamlet really needed but didn't get in the loyal but feckless Horatio. Note that at this point in the novel - more than 25% in - we have not yet met R's mother nor his beloved sister, Dunya; we have not yet met the police inspector who will investigate the case, Porfiry; and we have nearly forgotten Marmeladov and his daughter Sony, who will play a key part of R's redemption. I'm not one to complain about "long Russian names," but have to admit I've been puzzled at a few points by the appearance of characters who get almost no introduction, such as the friend whom R meets at the Crystal Palace; these meetings send me leafing back through the novel to see if I've missed something. We do get a sense, though, that FD composed this novel in the same sort of frenzy in which R lives (or maybe that's an illusion).