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 before a word is spoken. 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. He has sold her stockings and her mohair shawl for drink. She coughs blood while scrubbing. 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 partitioned off at the Kapernaumovs, still bringing money after dark. At first a lodger tried to make up to her, then stood on his dignity about sharing rooms with a girl like that, and the household split. Marmeladov drinks, he says, so that he may suffer twice as much.

For five weeks hope returned. Marmeladov begged his way back into a government post under Ivan Afanasyvitch, 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 strikes the table and erupts into a sermon about crucifixion and divine forgiveness. He insists God will call forth drunkards and children of shame, and will forgive 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 neighbours laugh through the doorway.

Raskolnikov slips leftover coppers onto the windowsill and leaves. On the stairs he almost turns back, then mutters bitterly that 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? The neighbours have already wept over the room and grown used to it. Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel, he thinks, and then the opposite thought arrives just as fast.