Mark André ’s Reviews > The Insulted and the Injured > Status Update

“I try to employ as few hints as I can, whoever I am speaking to,” answered Natasha. “I always try, on the contrary, to be as outspoken as I can, .. .

The stranger kept grumbling and cursing the stairs as he climbed up, his language growing stronger and more violent as he pro­ceeded. Of course the staircase was narrow, filthy, steep and never lighted; but the language I heard on the third floor was such that I could never have ascribed it to the prince: the ascending gentleman was swearing like a trooper.

It was a grim story, one of those grim and poignant dramas which are so often played out unseen, almost mysterious, under the heavy sky of Petersburg, in the dark secret corners of the vast city, in the midst of the giddy ferment of life, of dull egoism, of clashing interests, of gloomy vice and secret crimes, in that seething hell of a senseless and abnormal life_ _

I was startled. The plot of a whole drama seemed to flash before my eyes.That poor woman dying in a cellar at the coffin-maker’s, her orphan child occasionally visiting the old grandfather who had cursed her mother, the queer crazed old man dying in the confectioner’s shop after his dog had died.

It often happens to me that I go and open a book to look up something, and become engrossed in my reading to the exclusion of everything else.

They’d scold me, but I’d say nothing on purpose. They’d beat me, but I wouldn’t speak, I wouldn’t speak. Let them beat me— I wouldn’t cry for anything. They’d be sick with anger because I wasn’t crying.

The vivid rosy beams of early sunrise were already playing on the wall.

... and I’m utterly at a loss to fathom— tell me, ask your own heart, will she be happy in that marriage? Reproaches and humiliations, with a mere boy for a life partner who is weary of her love already, and who will begin to neglect her, insult her, and humiliate her as soon as he marries her; the strength of her passion unabating while his grows cooler; jealousy, tortures, hell, divorce, perhaps crime itself....

Such extravagant idealism amazed me.

By degrees her tears passed into sobs.