Inside the story
Meet Alyona Ivanovna
Alyona Ivanovna is an elderly, wealthy pawnbroker in St. Petersburg, lending money against valuables and dealing harshly with those who come to her. She is known to Raskolnikov, a poor former student whose troubled ideas about society place her in his thoughts.
On the page
A diminutive, withered-up old woman of sixty, with sharp malignant eyes and a sharp little nose; her colourless, somewhat grizzled hair thickly smeared with oil and left uncovered, and a thin long neck like a hen's leg.
