The book dialog game

A clue, this is actually a short story. Also another passage:

Aside from the biscuits, we gave Tanya many advices—to dress more warmly, not to run fast on the staircase, nor to carry heavy loads of wood. She listened to our advice with a smile, replied to us with laughter and never obeyed us, but we did not feel offended at this. All we needed was to show that we cared for her. She often turned to us with various requests. She asked us, for instance, to open the heavy cellar door, to chop some wood. We did whatever she wanted us to do with joy, and even with some kind of pride.

But when one of us asked her to mend his only shirt, she declined, with a contemptuous sneer.

We laughed heartily at the queer fellow, and never again asked her for anything. We loved her; all is said in this. A human being always wants to bestow his love upon some one, although he may sometime choke or slander him; he may poison the life of his neighbor with his love, because, loving, he does not respect the beloved. We had to love Tanya, for there was no one else we could love.

[poohbear_nc]

something by Chekhov?

[issybird]

I'm guessing something by Turgenev, but I don't know the story.

So the correct author has not been mentioned, nor even a book by the correct author. Here is another passage:

There were twenty-six of us—twenty-six living machines, locked up in a damp cellar, where we patted dough from morning till night, making biscuits and cakes. The windows of our cellar looked out into a ditch, which was covered with bricks grown green from dampness, the window frames were obstructed from the outside by a dense iron netting, and the light of the sun could not peep in through the panes, which were covered with flour-dust.

[issybird]

Gorky? I still don't know the story.

[poohbear_nc]

Tolstoy?

[poohbear_nc]

Karel Čapek

So I will reveal that the story was Twenty-six and One by Maxim Gorky. It is from the book Twenty-six and One and Other Stories that also includes the excellent Tchelkache and Malva.

I figure it should be back to issybird, since she did guess Gorky.

[issybird]

"Done because we are too menny."

[issybird]

^^I quoted the single most heart-rending line from what is perhaps the most depressing book in the English language, one of the Victorians.

Here's a couple more:

"Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a lifelong comradeship tolerable."

And

"Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons!"

[poohbear_nc]

perhaps the most depressing book in the English language

Gotta be Thomas Hardy then ....

"Jude the Obscure"?

or the tragic "Tess"?

been too long since I've slogged through his novels

[issybird]

pooh's got it. Jude the Obscure it is. The first line I quoted was

Spoiler:

the suicide note left by the children before they hanged themselves.

I put Hardy in the category that I'm glad I slogged through them decades ago, because I'm not reading them now.

[poohbear_nc]

OK then - from depressing Russian to depressing English prose .....

Let's turn to creepy and obsessive now ....

"There were even times I thought I would forget her. but forgetting's not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn't happen to me."

"What I'm trying to say is that having her as my guest happened suddenly, it wasn't something I planned the moment the money came."

[poohbear_nc]

And:

"I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing."

[HomeInMyShoes]

Franz Kafka? The Metamorphosis?