For the first time in my life I find myself out of work, not counting, of course, the few occasions when in my youth, I happened to find myself without a post for two or three weeks, but one took it so lightly then, as one does everything else in youth. I even forget what the experience was like. Now I am forty-six, and have a family.⁠ ⁠… + 

What good am I to anyone now? What right have I to live? I have no justification other than my willingness to work. So long as I had work and supported my helpless little ones, I was a man with a claim to respect and consideration, but now⁠ ⁠… I’m no better than the lowest ne’er-do-well; I’m the most insignificant person on the face of the earth. I cannot even supply the needs of my own miserable existence, let alone the needs of those depending on me. A sparrow pecking manure on the road has a greater right to live than I! + 

As long as I worked I was a personality, a visible, tangible quantity; my little efforts helped to make the common wheel go round; now I am dead, as it were. I am no more than a ghost among the living, though to outward impressions alive. What a horrible condition to be in! My voice even has changed, and assumed an ingratiating quality it used not to possess; my walk has become slouching and cautious. I seem to be tiptoeing through the house, the only person awake, trying not to disturb the others. If it were not for the fact that most people were a little unlike themselves just now, mother would notice that it was only the ghost of my former self that went and came each day. I act very cleverly in Sashenka’s presence not to let her see anything, but we so rarely meet now; I do my best to avoid her as much as I can, on plea of pressing work. + 

I know that I’m not to blame for what has happened; I’m only the victim of circumstances, but that is small consolation. No self-respecting man could find consolation and satisfaction in the thought of being a victim. The more I think of it the more I hate myself for my inefficiency and limitations. My life hangs on the merest thread that any casual person can break at his will. What have I accomplished to sit calmly with folded arms. Where are the indelible traces of my personality, the fruits of my labour? Some chairs and tables, a few garments, two children, is the sum total of all my achievements.⁠ ⁠… But what am I saying? I have chests of drawers, down pillows, four hundred roubles in the savings bank, a lottery ticket in my pocket with which I stand the chance of winning two hundred thousand roubles. It would be both interesting and instructive to make a complete inventory of the things I have acquired by my own efforts during the whole of my life. + 

It’s overwhelming and shameful to think what little there is! I can’t stay in this flat for more than another month, and then.⁠ ⁠… Poor children, what a wretched father you possess! + 