🕯 In the Gutter, She Shines: A Tavern Dialogue on Sonya Marmeladov
Sonya is my angel: Presented as a one-act stage play for newsletter readers
Title: In the Gutter, She Shines
Cast:
SVIDRIGAILOV – Libertine, nihilist, man decaying from the inside out.
THE THIRD PLAYER – A shapeshifter, both angel and devil, conscience and temptation, dressed in an ambiguous coat that flickers between light and dark.
Setting:
A dim, rat-bitten tavern on K-- Street, Petersburg. The floor is sticky with beer and regret. A single gas lamp flickers over the table. It smells of piss, despair, and old bread. It is late.
ACT I
(SVIDRIGAILOV sits hunched over a glass of brandy. His coat is stained, his eyes burning. Across from him sits THE THIRD PLAYER, sipping inexplicably clean tea from an invisible cup.)
SVIDRIGAILOV
(leaning back)
She’s too damn pure for this pisshole world.
(beat)
Sonya... that little bird. Broken wings, maybe. But not dirty. Not like the rest of us.
THE THIRD PLAYER
(smirking, voice velvet)
And yet she walks the street. A body for bread. That doesn’t soil her in your ledger?
SVIDRIGAILOV
She’s not like us.
She ain’t selling sin. She’s selling salvation with a side of damnation.
"She was not ashamed." That’s what Raskolnikov said. You remember? When he found her apartment.
Clean. Icons in the corner. Hope nailed to a wall.
THE THIRD PLAYER
(changing posture — angel now)
Hope is the rarest thing in Petersburg. She’s drowning in it. And still breathes.
SVIDRIGAILOV
You ever look into her eyes?
Not a flicker of judgment. Just... pity. Not the condescending kind.
The kind that forgives you before you ask.
That's why I couldn't touch her.
Me, Svidrigailov! Who’s f---ed everything that moved.
THE THIRD PLAYER
(shifting darker)
So what was she, then? To you?
SVIDRIGAILOV
Not a woman.
A mirror.
A goddamn rebuke wrapped in rags.
She believed in Raskolnikov. Followed him into exile like a disciple.
Hell, I’d have let him swing.
THE THIRD PLAYER
(chiding)
But she reads the Gospel. Weeps for the broken. Cradles children that ain’t hers.
She’s no whore. She’s holy.
SVIDRIGAILOV
She’s holy because she’s in the dirt.
Anyone can pray in a palace.
But Sonya, Sonya prays in a tenement with vomit in the corner.
THE THIRD PLAYER
(flashing gold)
“She knelt down before him and pressed her lips to his hand.”
Remember that line? After he confesses.
She didn't flinch. Didn’t judge.
She loved him in the blood and the murder and the madness.
SVIDRIGAILOV
She scares the shit out of me.
What do you do with someone like that?
Can’t buy her. Can’t break her.
You just drink until you can’t see her face anymore.
(He drains the glass. A long silence falls between them.)
THE THIRD PLAYER
(soft, almost tender)
And still, she would have wept at your grave.
SVIDRIGAILOV
(smirking)
Which is why I put the bullet in before she had the chance.
(The candle flickers. THE THIRD PLAYER vanishes. SVIDRIGAILOV sits alone. The tavern groans around him.)
BLACKOUT.
📜 Notes for the Reader
This dialogue is drawn from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, where Sonya Marmeladov emerges as the moral and spiritual heart of the novel—a symbol of Christ-like compassion living among the damned. Her strength lies not in rejection of suffering, but in her willingness to carry it, to redeem it.
“What would I be without God?”, Sonya
She is not naïve. She is radically courageous. And maybe, like Svidrigailov said, she’s the only one in Petersburg who could still believe a soul can be saved.
🖋️ If this moved you, share it. Or whisper her name next time you feel too far gone.