Poor People by Fyodor Dostoevsky — Read

11th August

Varvara Alexeyevna! My sweetheart, my dear! I'm ruined, we're both ruined, we're both of us irrevocably ruined together. My reputation, pride – all is lost! I am destroyed and you are destroyed, my dear, you too are irrevocably destroyed along with me! It is I, I that have led you to destruction! I am persecuted, my dear, despised, held up to mockery, and my landlady has simply begun abusing me; she shouted and shouted at me today, gave me such a roasting, set me lower than a splinter. And at Ratazyayev's in the evening one of them began reading out loud the draft of a letter that I wrote to you but accidentally let drop out of my pocket. Oh madam, how they jeered! They called out our names, called them out and they roared and roared with laughter, the traitors! I went in to them and accused Ratazyayev of treachery; I told him he was a traitor! And Ratazyayev replied that I was a traitor myself, that I was busy with various conquests; "you were hiding yourself from us," ‌he says, "you're a Lovelace,"* and now they all call me Lovelace, and I don't have any other name! Do you hear, my little angel, do you hear – now they know everything, they're familiar with everything, and they know about you, my dear, and everything there is to know about you, they know about everything! And that's nothing! Faldoni's the same, he's in it with them as well; I sent him to the sausage shop to get something today; he simply won't go, he says he's got something to do! "But it's your duty to go," I say. "No, it's not," he says, "it's not my duty, you don't pay my mistress any money, so I don't have any duty towards you." I wasn't going to take an insult from him, from an uneducated peasant, and I called him a fool; and he says to me – "it takes one to know one." I thought he must have been drinking to say something so rude to me – and so I say to him, "you're drunk, you peasant, you!" And he says to me: "And it was you that treated me, was it? Have you got the money for the hair of the dog yourself? You have to beg ten copecks at a time off some woman," – and then added: "Huh! And still think you can give orders!" There, my dear, that's what things have come to! I'm ashamed to be alive, Varenka! I'm like a man possessed; worse than some tramp without a passport. Grave calamities! I'm lost, simply lost! Irrevocably lost.