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Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin is Dunya’s fiancé, and a distant relative of Marfa Petrovna, for whom Dunya worked as a governess. Luzhin is a middle-class man who has achieved some success in his career as a lawyer. Respectable on the surface, Luzhin is, at his core, ungenerous, ignoble, and self-important. He admits to Pulcheria Alexandrovna that he has always wanted to marry a poor woman like Dunya, as he believes that rescuing a woman from poverty via marriage would secure her complete loyalty, as she would always be eternally grateful to her savior. He imagines himself a merciful benefactor worthy of the worship and subservience of a beautiful, educated young woman such as Dunya, while in reality he is simply exploitative of Dunya’s desperation to provide for her family.
While Dunya and Pulcheria Alexandrovna are hopeful that Luzhin is not as cheap or pompous of a man as he appears, Raskolnikov immediately takes a dislike to Luzhin and voices his intent to break their engagement. Luzhin attempts to manipulate Dunya into turning against Raskolnikov, but his duplicitous, mean-spirited nature is exposed when his scheme to implicate Sonya in a crime goes awry. Luzhin’s willingness to destroy Sonya’s reputation and even have her sent to prison for theft shows his utter lack of moral character.
