Poor Folk and Other Stories

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  Well, my dear, I don’t really remember how I got out of that place, how I managed to cross Vyborg Street and get on to Voskresensky Bridge. I was horribly tired, was chilled to the bone and it was ten o’clock before I managed to report for work. I wanted to brush some of the mud off me, but Snegiryov the caretaker wouldn’t let me: ‘You’d ruin the brush, master, and it’s government property,’ he said. That is the way they all behave now, little mother. To these people I’m no better than a rag for them to wipe their boots on. Do you know what it is that breaks my spirit, Varenka? It is not the money, it is all these everyday worries, all these whispers, smiles, jokes. Apparently it is possible that His Excellency may concern himself with my particulars – Oh, little mother, my golden days have passed forever! Today I reread all your letters; it made me so sad, little mother! Goodbye, my darling, may the Lord preserve you!

  M. DEVUSHKIN

  PS My intention, Varenka, was to describe my troubles from a humorous point of view, but I evidently don’t have the knack of it, humour, I mean. I shall come and see you, little mother, without fail, I shall come tomorrow.

  August 11

  Varvara Alekseyevna! Little mother, my dove! I am lost, we are both lost, both of us together, irretrievably lost. My reputation, mypride – allgone. It is the end of me, and the end of you, little mother, it is the irreversible end of both of us together! And it is I, I who have brought you to this! They are persecuting me, little mother, they treat me with contempt, hold me up to ridicule, and the landlady has simply begun to abuse me; she has been shouting and shouting at me today, she railed and railed at me, reduced me to the lowest of the low. And this evening in Ratazyayev is room one of them began reading out the draft of a letter I’d written you, it had somehow fallen out of my pocket. Mother of mine, what a feast of derision they had over it! They named us, they named us out loud and hooted with laughter, the traitors! I went into the room where they were and accused Ratazyayev of treachery; I told him he was a traitor. Ratazyayev replied that I myself was a traitor, that I spent my time with ‘various conquests’: ‘You’ve been hiding it from us,’ he said. ‘You’re a Lovelace. ‘* And now they all call me ‘Lovelace’, and won’t address me by any other name! Do you hear, my little angel, do you hear? Now they know everything, they have all the facts, they know about you, my darling, they know about all your personal matters, they know it all! Why, even Faldoni was there, and he is in cahoots with them; I sent him out to the sausage-shop to buy something; he simply refused to go; ‘I’m busy,’ he said. ‘But you’re obliged to,’ I said. ‘Oh no, I’m not,’ he said; ‘you haven’t paid my mistress her rent, so I’m not obliged to you.’ I wasn’t going to have an uneducated peasant insulting me, and I told him he was a fool; to which he replied: ‘And you’re another one.’ I think he must have been drunk, to say such an offensive thing to me – and indeed I said to him: ‘You’re drunk, you peasant!’ To which he replied: ‘Well, if I am it is not at your expense, you haven’t got enough money to get drunk yourself; you even go begging for a few copecks from some woman or other.’ And then he added: ‘And you’re a gentleman, too!’ You see what it has come to, little mother? I’m ashamed to go on living, Varenka! Like some kind of outcast; worse than a vagrant without a passport. It is a terrible disaster! -it is the end of me, quite simply the end! The irreversible end!

  M.D.

  August 13

  Dearest Makar Alekseyevich,

  It’s just one thing after another, I myself no longer know what to do! What is to become of you now? As for myself, things do not look too rosy for me; today I burned my left hand with the iron; I let it fall by accident, and it bruised me and burned me, both at the same time. I cannot possibly do any work, and Fedora has been ill for three days now. I am in an agonizing state of agitation. I send you thirty copecks in silver; it is practically the last money we have left; oh, as God is my witness, how I should have liked to be able to help you now in your privations. It hurts me to the point of tears, not to be able to do so! Goodbye, my friend! You would bring me great consolation if you would come and visit us today.

  V. D.

  August 14

  Makar Alekseyevich! What has got into you? You must have lost your fear of God! You are simply driving me out of my mind. Are you not ashamed? You will be your own undoing. Just think of your reputation! You are an honest, decent, self-respecting man – well, what will you do when everyone hears of you? You will simply die of shame! Have you no fear of God? Fedora told me that she refuses to help you any more, and I won’t give you any more money, either. What have you brought me to, Makar Alekseyevich? I expect you probably think I don’t care that you behave so badly; you don’t know what I have to endure because of you! I can’t even go up and down our stairs: everyone stares at me and points to me with their fingers, and they say such terrible things; yes, they say quite openly that I’ve taken up with a drunkard. Think what I feel when I hear that! When you are brought back here all the lodgers point at you with contempt: ‘Look,’ they say,’they’ve brought that clerk back again.’ And I can’t endure the shame I feel for you. I swear to you that I will move away from here. I’ll go and work somewhere as a housemaid or a laundrywoman, but I won’t stop here. I wrote asking you to come and visit me, but you never did. My tears and entreaties evidently mean nothing to you, Makar Alekseyevich! And where did you get the money from, in any case? In the Lord’s name, take care! I mean, you will come to ruin, you will come to ruin for nothing! And the shame, the ignominy! The landlady refused to let you in last night, you spent the night in the outhouse: I know everything. If you knew how wretched I felt when I learned of it. Please come and see me, visiting us will cheer you up: we’ll read together, we’ll remember old times. Fedora will tell us about the religious pilgrimages she was on. Please, for my sake, my dear friend, don’t bring about your own undoing and my own. After all, I live for you alone, and it is for your sake that I am remaining with you. And this is how you behave! Be a decent man, steadfast in misfortune; remember that poverty is not a sin. And indeed, what reason is there for despair? It is all just temporary! With God is good will, everything will come right again – only now you must exercise self-control. I send you twenty copecks, buy some tobacco with it or whatever takes your fancy, only don’t, for the love of God, spend it on drink. Come and see us, come and see us without fail. Perhaps you’ll feel ashamed, the way you did last time, but don’t: it is a false shame. Just bring some genuine repentance with you. Trust in God. He will arrange everything for the best.

  V. D.

  August 19

  Varvara Alekseyevna, little mother!

  I am put to shame, Varvara Alekseyevna, my treasure, I am utterly put to shame. But in the end, little mother, what is so special about all this? Why not cheer one is heart a little? When the soles of my boots fall off I don’t give them any thought, because a boot-sole is rubbish, and will always be nothing more than an ordinary, vile, dirty boot-sole. And boots themselves are rubbish, too! If the Greek sages could go around without boots, why should a fellow like me waste time fussing over such undignified objects? So, in that case, why insult me, why treat me with contempt? Oh, little mother, little mother, these are fine things you write to me! And you can tell Fedora that she is a quarrelsome, flighty, disorderly woman, and what is more a stupid one, unspeakably stupid! As for my grey hair, you are wrong about that, my dear, because I am not nearly as old as you think I am. Yemelya sends you his greetings. You say in your letter that you have been grieving and weeping; well, I will tell you that I have been grieving and weeping, too. In conclusion I wish you happiness and good health; as for myself, I am happy and in good health, too, and remain, my little angel,

  Your friend,

  MAKAR DEVUSHKIN

  August 21

  Varvara Alekseyevna, Dear Madam and kind friend,

  I feel that it is all my fault, I feel that I have sinned in your regard, and in my opinion there is no advantage to be derived from that at a
ll, little mother, from the fact that I feel all that, whatever you may say. I felt it all even before my misdemeanour, but then my spirits sank with the consciousness of my guilt. My little mother, I am not a man of ill will, I am not hard-hearted; but in order to torture your little heart, my dove, one would have to be no more nor less than a bloodthirsty tiger, and, well, I possess the heart of a lamb and have, as you know, no disposition towards greed; consequently, my little angel, I am not entirely to blame for my misdemeanour, since neither my feelings nor my thoughts were to blame; and indeed, I don’t know what was to blame. It is a puzzling business, little mother! You sent me thirty copecks in silver, and then twenty in copper; my heart began to ache as I surveyed your orphan is mite. You had burned your little hand, you would soon be going hungry yourself, yet you told me to buy tobacco. Well, what was I to do in such a position? Was I, like some bandit, to start plundering you, a little orphan? It was at that point that my spirits sank, little mother; that is to say, at first, being overwhelmed by the feeling that I was no good for anything and was little better than the sole of one of my own boots, I thought it improper for me to believe myself of any consequence, and started to view myself as something improper and, to a certain degree, indecent. Well, once I had lost all respect for myself, once I had abandoned myself to the denial of all my good qualities and of my own sense of self-worth, then I was done for, my downfall was assured! It is all predetermined by fate, and I am not to blame for it. I started off by going out for a breath of fresh air. Then it was just one thing after another: nature was so lachrymose, the weather was cold, it was raining, and, well, Yemelya happened to come along. He had already pawned everything he owned, Varenka, all his things had found another home, and when I met him he hadn’t had a drop of poppy-dew in his mouth for two whole days, so he was at the stage of trying to pawn what can’t be pawned, because it is not the kind of thing that is acceptable as security. Well, you see, Varenka, I gave in more out of compassion for suffering humanity than because I felt that way inclined. That is how that sin came to be committed, little mother! He and I wept together! We talked about you. he is a good, a thoroughly good man, and one of great feeling. I feel all this myself, little mother; that is the reason why all these things happen, because I feel it all so intensely. I know how much I owe you, my little dove! When I got to know you, I began, for a start, to know myself better, and I came to love you; before you came along, my little angel, I was lonely and as good as asleep, I wasn’t really living in the world at all. They, my ill-wishers, said that even my appearance was indecent; they treated me with repugnance, and, well, I began to share it. They said I was stupid, and I really believed them. When you came my way you lit up the whole of my dark life, so that my heart and my soul were illumined, and I attained tranquillity of mind, founded in the knowledge that I was no worse than other men; with the one reservation that I had no outstanding abilities of any kind, that I had no gloss, no style – but for all that, I was a human being, with the thoughts and feelings of a human being. Well, but now, feeling that I was being hounded by fate and that, humiliated by her, I had abandoned myself to the denial of my own sense of self-worth, I let my spirits sink, dejected by the calamities that had befallen me. And as you now know everything, little mother, I beg you in tears not to show any further inquisitiveness about that matter, as my heart is breaking, and I am in the most bitter distress.

  I bear testimony, little mother, to my continued esteem for you, and remain your faithful,

  MAKAR DEVUSHKIN

  September 3

  I did not finish my last letter to you, Makar Alekseyevich, because I have been feeling too heavy of heart to be able to write. Sometimes I have moments when I am glad to be alone – to be sad alone, depressed alone, without sharing my mood – and such moments are beginning to visit me more and more often. In my memories there is something I find inexplicable, something which absorbs me so instinctively and so powerfully that for several hours at a stretch I am oblivious to all that surrounds me and forget everything, everything that is in the present. In the life I am presently leading there is nothing, whether pleasant, grievous or sad, which does not remind me of something similar in my past, above all in my childhood, my golden childhood! But after such moments are past I always have a heavy heart. I seem to lose my strength, my reverie exhausts me; and my health is getting worse and worse, even without this additional strain. But today the fresh, bright, radiant morning, of which in autumn here there are but few, brought me back to life, and I greeted it with joy. So, autumn is with us already! How I used to love autumn in the country! I was just a child in those days, but even then I experienced a great many feelings. I preferred the autumn evenings to the mornings. I can remember that just a few yards from our house, at the foot of the hill, there was a lake. That lake – I seem to see it now – that lake was so wide and light, as pure as crystal! Sometimes, if the wind had died, the lake would be calm; there was not a rustle from the trees that grew along the shore, the water was as still as a mirror. So fresh, so cold! The dew would be settling on the grass, the lights would start to glimmer in the izbas* along the shore, a herd of cattle would be being driven home – it was then that I would slip stealthily out of the house in order to look at my lake, and I would lose myself in its contemplation. Right by the edge of the water the fishermen would have a faggot burning, and its light would flow far, far away, out over the water. The sky was socold – darkblue, illumined at the horizon by red, fiery stripes, which became paler and paler; the moon would come out; the air would be so resonant that if a frightened bird were to flutter its wings, a reed to begin murmuring in the light breeze, or a fish to splash in the water – one could hear it all. A white vapour, delicate and transparent, would rise over the dark-blue water. The distant expanses grew dark; everything seemed to drown in the mist, and yet all that was close to was sharply defined, as if cut by achisel – theboat, the shore, the islands; a disused barrel, which had been left on the shore, now bobbing slightly in the water, the branch of a willow tangling its yellowed leaves with the reeds – then a late seagull would go flapping up, now diving into the cold water, now flapping up again and disappearing into the mist. I would become lost in contemplation and listening – I would feel wonderfully happy! Yet I was still only a young thing, a child… I loved the autumn so much – the late autumn, when the harvest is being brought in and all the work of the fields is coming to a close, when the sit-round gatherings are beginning in the peasant izbas, when everyone is waiting for winter. At that time of year everything grows gloomier, the yellow leaves strew the padhs along the edges of the bare woods, which turn dark blue, almost black – especially at evening, when a damp mist descends and the trees loom out of it like giants, like terrible, monstrous apparitions. I might delay in returning while out on a walk, fall behind the others, walk alone, quickening mystep – itwas sinister! I myself would be trembling like one of those leaves; there, I would think, at any moment some fearsome being will look out of that tree-hollow; and all the while the wind would be rushing through the woods, whistling, moaning and howling so dolefully, tearing the clusters of leaves from the withered twigs, whirling them in the air; and, in a long, wide, noisy flock, the birds hurtling after them with wild, penetrating cries, turning the sky black as they covered it across. I would grow afraid, and then I would seem to hear someone is voice whispering: ‘Run, run, child, don’t delay; terrible things will happen here in a moment, run, child!’ A sense of horror would grip my heart, and I would run and run until my breath gave out. I would reach home, panting; there it was noisy and cheerful; all of us children would be given work to do: shelling peas or seeding poppies. The damp firewood crackled in the stove; Mother would cheerfully supervise our cheerful work; our old nurse Ulyana would tell us about the old days, or relate terrifying stories about corpses and enchanters. We children would huddle together, girl companion against girl companion, and we would all have a smile on our lips. Then suddenly we would all fall silent… lis
ten! A noise! Like someone knocking! But it would be nothing; just old Frolovna is spinning-wheel droning away; how we would laugh! And then at night we would be unable to sleep because we were so afraid; we would have such terrible dreams. Waking up in the middle of the night, I would not dare to stir, and shivered under the bedspread until daybreak. In the morning I would rise as fresh as a daisy. I would look out of the window: the fields would be covered in frost; the delicate hoarfrost of autumn hung from the bare branches; there would be a thin covering of ice on the lake; a white vapour would be rising over its surface; the birds would be singing merrily. The sun shone on everything with its brilliant rays, which would break the thin ice like glass. Everything was light, brilliant, happy! The fire would be crackling in the stove once more; we would all seat ourselves close to the samovar, and our black dog Polkan, chilled to the marrow from being out all night, would look in at the window with a friendly wag of his tail. A muzhik would ride by on his best horse, on his way into the woods to gather firewood. Everyone was so pleased, so happy!… Oh, what a golden time my childhood was!… Now I have begun to cry like a child, carried away in my memories. I remember it all so vividly, so vividly, all my past stands so clearly before me, and the present seems so lustreless, so gloomy!… How will this end, how will it all end? You know, I have a sort of conviction, a kind of certainty that I shall die this autumn. I am very, very ill. I often think about dying, but even so I don’t want to die like this, and be buried here. It may be that I shall have to take to my bed again, as I did back in the spring, though I have still not recovered. Even now I feel very heavy of heart. Fedora has gone off somewhere for the whole day, and I am here alone. For some time now, however, I have been afraid to be left on my own; I keep imagining that there is someone else in the room with me, that someone is talking to me; especially when I start to muse about something and suddenly snap out of my musing, in such a way that I grow afraid. That is why I have written you such a long letter; when I write, that feeling passes. Goodbye: I shall finish now, because I have no more paper nor time. Of the money I got from pawning my dresses and my hat I have only a ruble in silver left. You have given your landlady two rubles in silver; that is fine, now she will keep quiet for a bit.