White nights, and other storiesDostoyevsky, Fyodor
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White nights, and other stories
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821-1881 -- Translations into English; Russian fiction -- Translations into English
just like her luck--even here, she is head-foremost, the hussy. Shorten
the cord, you rascal.' 'It's all right as it is.' 'All right, is it?
Why, she's on her side! She was a fellow-creature, after all! But, never
mind, throw the earth on her.' And they won't care to waste much time
quarrelling over you. They will scatter the wet blue clay as quick as
they can and go off to the tavern ... and there your memory on earth
will end; other women have children to go to their graves, fathers,
husbands. While for you neither tear, nor sigh, nor remembrance; no one
in the whole world will ever come to you, your name will vanish from the
face of the earth--as though you had never existed, never been born at
all! Nothing but filth and mud, however you knock at your coffin lid at
night, when the dead arise, however you cry: 'Let me out, kind people,
to live in the light of day! My life was no life at all; my life has
been thrown away like a dish-clout; it was drunk away in the tavern at
the Haymarket; let me out, kind people, to live in the world again.'"
And I worked myself up to such a pitch that I began to have a lump in my
throat myself, and ... and all at once I stopped, sat up in dismay, and
bending over apprehensively, began to listen with a beating heart. I had
reason to be troubled.
I had felt for some time that I was turning her soul upside down and
rending her heart, and--and the more I was convinced of it, the more
eagerly I desired to gain my object as quickly and as effectually as
possible. It was the exercise of my skill that carried me away; yet it
was not merely sport....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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