There’s only eight different parts of speech. Every word that exists, or has yet to exist, belongs to (atleast) one of these categories. And yet, this is sufficient to express the infinite experiences, thoughts, ideas and emotions of humanity in their infinite permutations.
The assignment was to copy the first three pages of a Top 100 novel, and then underline the adjectives and adverbs, bold the nouns, and italicize the verbs. I chose “Crime and Punishment” by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, although in hindsight every version of it is only a translation from the original Russian, so some of the author’s voice and personality is inevitably lost.
On a very hot evening at the beginning of July a young man left his little room at the top of a house in Cerpenter Lane, went out into the street, and, as though unable to make up his mind, walked slowly in the direction of Kokushkin Bridge.
He was lucky to avoid a meeting with his landlady on the stairs. His little room under the very roof of a tall five-story building was more like a cupboard than a living–room. His landlady, who also provided him with meals and looked after him, lived in a flat on the floor below. Every time he went out, he had to walk past her kitchen, the door of which was practically always open; and every time he walked past that door, the young man experienced a sickening sensation of terror which made him feel ashamed and pull a wry face. He was up to the neck in debt to his landlady and was afraid of meeting her.
It was not as though he were a coward by nature or easily intimidated. Quite the contrary. But for some time past he had been in an irritable and overstrung state which was like hypochondria. He has been so absorbed in himself and had led so cloistered a life that he was afraid of meeting anybody, let alone his landlady. He was crushed by poverty, but even his straitened circumstances had ceased to worry him lately. He had lost all interest in matters that required his most immediate attention and he did not want to bother about them. As a matter of fact, he was not in the least afraid of his landlady, whatever plots she might be hatching against him. But rather than be forced to stop on the stairs and listen to all the dreary nonsense which did not concern him at all, to all those insistent demands for payment, to all those threats and complaints, and have to think up some plausible excuse and tell lies-no! A thousand times better to slip downstairs as quickly as a mouse and escape without being seen by anybody.
This time, however, as he reached the street, his fear of meeting his landlady surprised even himself.
‘Good Lord!’ he thought to himself, with a strange smile, ‘here I am thinking of doing such a thing and at the same time I am in a jitter over such a trivial matter. Well, of course, everything is in a man’s own hands, and if he lets everything slip through his fingers, it is through sheer cowardice. That’s an axiom. I wonder, though, what people fear most. It seems to me that what they are afraid of most is of taking a new step or uttering a new word. However, I’m talking too much. It’s because I talk too much that I do nothing. Still, I daresay the opposite is probably true too. I talk too much because I do nothing. It is during the last month that I have got into the habit of talking to myself. Lying about all day long in that beastly hole and thinking–thinking all sorts of absurd things. What the hell am I going there for now? Am I really capable of doing that? Is that serious? Not a bit of it! It isn’t serious at all. Just amusing myself by indulging in fantastic dreams. Toys! Yes, I suppose that’s what it is–toys!’
It was terribly hot in the street, and the stifling air, the crowds of people the heaps of mortar everywhere, the scaffolding and the bricks, the dust and that peculiar summer stench which is so familiar to everyone who lives in Petersburg and cannot afford to rent a cottage in the country–all that had a most unfortunate effect on the young man’s already overwrought nerves. And the unendurable stench from the pubs, which are particularly numerous in that part of the town, and the drunks that came across every few yards although it was a weekday, provided the finishing touch to a picture already sufficiently dismal and horrible. For a brief moment an expression of the profoundest disgust passed over the young man’s refined face. He was, incidentally, quite an extraordinarily handsome young man, with beautiful dark eyes, dark brown hair, over medium height, slim and well–built. But soon he sank into a sort of deep reverie, or perhaps he might truly be said to have fallen into a kind of a coma, and he went on his way without paying any attention to his surroundings and without even giving them a thought. From time to time he would mutter something to himself because of his habit of indulging in soliloquies, a habit to which he was had just acknowledged himself to be addicted. At that moment he was fully aware that his thoughts were at times confused and that he was very weak: for two days now he had hardly anything to eat.
He was so badly dressed that any other man in his place, even if he were accustomed to it, would have been ashamed to go out in the daytime into the streets in such rags. It was true, though, that in that particular part of the town it would be hard to astonish anyone by the kind of clothes one wore. The proximity of the Hay Market, the great number of disorderly houses, and, most of all, the working-class population which crammed these streets and alley–ways in the centre of Petersburg, lent so bizarre an aspect to the whole place that it would indeed have been strange to be surprised at meeting any man, however cautiously dressed. But so much bitter contempt had accumulated in the young man’s heart that, notwithstanding his occasional youthful fastidiousness in dress, he was least of all ashamed of his rags in the street. He would, no doubt, have felt entirely differently if he had met some of his acquaintances or former friends, whom, as a rule, he was not very fond of meeting. And yet when a drunken man who for some unknown reason was being taken somewhere in a huge empty cart drawn by an enormous dray–horse, suddenly shouted at him as he drove past, ‘Hey, you there, German hatter!’ and began bawling at the top of his voice and pointing at him, the young man at once stopped in his tracks and clutched nervously at his hat. His hat was tall and round and it had come originally from Zimmerman’s fashionable shop, but it was very shabby now, grown rusty with age, full of holes and covered with stains, without a brim, and cocked on one side at a most disreputable angle. But it was not shame, it was quite another feeling, a feeling that was more like fear, that had overtaken him.
‘I knew it!’ he muttered in confusion. ‘I thought so! That’s the worst of it! It is just such an idiotic thing, such a trivial detail, that could ruin the whole plan! Yes, I’m afraid my hat is too noticeable. It’s incongruous, and that is why it is noticeable. With my rags I ought to wear a cap, any old cap, but not this horror. Nobody wears such a hat. It can be seen a mile off. And people might remember it. Yes, that’s the trouble. They might remember it, and there’s your clue. In this sort of business one has to attract as little attention as possible. It’s the small things that matter. The small things. It’s just the small things that ruin everything. Always ruin everything.’
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