Marmeladov's Confession — Crime and Punishment

After the pawnbroker visit, Raskolnikov does something he rarely does: he wants company. He stays in a filthy tavern where the air alone could make you drunk, and a bloated former clerk named Marmeladov locks onto him with unsettling intensity. The man opens with a polished speech about poverty versus beggary, then confesses the ruin of his household. He married Katerina Ivanovna, a proud consumptive widow with three children, after her first husband died. When honest sewing paid starvation wages and the children cried, Sonia asked whether she really had to do a thing like that. Marmeladov lay drunk while she went out and returned with thirty roubles. Katerina spent the night on her knees at Sonia's feet. Since then Sonia has carried a yellow ticket and lives apart, still sending money home.

For five weeks hope returned. Marmeladov begged his way back into a government post, the family cooked real meals, and Katerina whispered to the landlady that her husband was respectable again. Then he stole the key to her box, took his fresh earnings, pawned his uniform, and vanished on another binge. He has slept on hay barges for five nights. That morning he went to Sonia for pocket change. The quart in his hand was bought with her last thirty copecks, the money she needs just to look presentable for her work. When the tavern crowd mocks him, he erupts into a sermon about crucifixion and divine forgiveness, insisting God will absolve Sonia because she loved much.

Raskolnikov walks him home to a squalid fourth-floor room at Kozel's house. Katerina paces with feverish eyes while hungry children huddle in the corners. She screams, searches his empty pockets, and drags him across the floor by his hair while neighbors laugh through the doorway. Raskolnikov slips his leftover coppers onto the windowsill and leaves. On the stairs he almost turns back, then mutters bitterly about how Sonia's appearance costs money. Walking through the summer night, a reckless thought surfaces: what if mankind is not a scoundrel after all, and every moral barrier is only prejudice?