Poor Folk by Fyodor Dostoevsky (Penguin Classics 1846)

 

On the other hand, perhaps she's just a fraud, purposely sending a hungry, feeble child out to dupe people, and thereby making him ill. And what does the poor boy learn from handing out these letters? His heart merely grows hard- ened; he goes around, runs up to people, begging. The people are going about their business, and they have no time. Their hearts are stony; their words are cruel: 'Be off with you! Go away! You won't make a monkey out of me!' That is what he hears from everyone's lips. His child's heart grows hardened, and the poor frightened boy shivers for nothing in the cold, like a little bird that has fallen out of a broken nest. His arms and legs are frozen; he gasps for breath. The next time you see him, he is coughing; it is not long before illness, like some unclean reptile, creeps into his breast, and when you look again, death is already standing over him in some stinking corner somewhere, and there is no way out, no help at hand — there you have his entire life! That's what life can be like! Oh, Varenka, it's so agonizing to hear those words 'For the love of Christ', and to walk on, and give the boy nothing, to say to him: 'God will provide.' Some 'For the love of Christ' are not so bad. (There are various kinds of them, little mother.) Others are long-drawn-out, habitual, studied - a beggar's stock-in-trade; it's not so hard to refrain from giving to one of those — he's an inveterate beggar, one of long stand- ing, a beggar by trade; he's used to it, you think, he'll get over it, he knows how to get over it. But another will be unpractised, coarse, terrible — as today when, just as I was about to take the letter from the boy, a man standing by the fence, who was selecting the people he asked for money, said to me: 'Give me a half-a-copeck, barin, for the love of Christ!' in such a rude, abrupt voice that I shuddered with a sense of terrible emotion, but did not give him a half-copeck: I didn't have one. And then again, there's the fact that rich people don't like the poor to complain of their lot out loud — they say they are causing trouble, being importunate! Yes, poverty is always importunate — perhaps those groans of hunger keep the rich awake!