The two interrogations in Crime and Punishment - 2 of the greatest chapters in literature

Of course two of the greatest scenes/chapters in F Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment - which is to say two of the greatest scenes in literature - are the two conversations/interrogations between Raskolnikov and the police detective/inspector Profiry. I won't be able to capture in full the complexity and nuances of these chapters in this blog post, but among other observations they show that methods of psychological profiling, though they didn't have the modern terminology for such practices, were well in use in 19th-century Russia (or at least FD foretold their use), pace Mindhunter and its assumption that these methods were an FBI revelation in the 1970s. In the first interrogation, Profiry keeps insisting that the two of them are simply having a conversation, that he's in particular interested in R's published article about "justified" killings - the bizarre theory that certain exceptional people are above the law and can rightfully take the lives of "lesser" people (you can think of contemporary analogs at will - this line of thinking is in some sense an indictment of all warfare). R becomes increasingly uncomfortable and disoriented, states that P is conducting an investigation and pushing him to slip up on various inconsistencies in his account of his activities on the day of the murders. P denies this claim, insisting that it's just a discussion - but R freaks out and demands that P charge him if he in fact is a suspect. Hm. The second interrogation is almost a reversal: Here P does almost all of the talking, giving his interpretation of how the murderers will reveal himself - and throughout his monologue R thinks, or at least wills himself to think, that P is describing the hapless house painter who confessed to the killings; at last, R asks who murdered the pawnbroker, and P replies: You did, of course. And then he tells of all the incidents that he's heard about from his sources - episodes from earlier in the novel, in which, for ex., R faints in a police station when the subject of the murders arises. R asks why P, therefore, doesn't arrest him on the spot; P, in his odd manner, tries to encourage R to admit guilt and turn himself in, which he says could lead to a lighter sentence. So in this instance, unlike the first interrogation, P insists that he is certain of R's guilt, that R is the only real suspect.