now, quite unable to interpret:

It ran as follows:

Dear Ivan Andreievitch--Vera tells me that you are ill again. She has
been round to enquire, I think. I did not come because I knew that if I
did I should only talk about my own troubles, the same as you've always
listened to, and what kind of food is that for a sick man? All the same,
that is just what I am doing now, but reading a letter is not like
talking to a man; you can always stop and tear the paper when perhaps it
would not be polite to ask a man to go. But I hope, nevertheless, that
you won't do that with this--not because of any desire I may have to
interest you in myself, but because of something of much more importance
than either of us, something I want you to believe--something you _must_
believe.... Don't think me mad. I am quite sane sitting here in my room
writing.... Every one is asleep. Every one but not everything. I've been
queer, now and again, lately... off and on. Do you know how it comes?
When the inside of the world goes further and further within dragging
you after it, until at last you are in the bowels of darkness choking.
I've known such moods all my life. Haven't you known them? Lately, of
course, I've been drinking again. I tell you, but I wouldn't own it to
most people. But they all know, I suppose.... Alexei made me start
again, but it's foolish to put everything on to him. If I weren't a weak
man he wouldn't be able to do anything with me, would he? Do you believe
in God, and don't you think that He intended the weak to have some
compensation somewhere, because it isn't their fault that they're weak,
is it! They can struggle and struggle, but it's like being in a net.
Well, one must just make a hole in the net large enough to get out of,
that's all. And now, ever since two days ago, when I resolved to make
that hole, I've been quite calm. I'm as calm as anything now writing to
you. Two days ago Vera told me that he was going back to England.... Oh,
she was so good to me that day, Ivan Andreievitch. We sat together all
alone in the flat, and she had her hand in mine, just as we used to do
in the old days when I pretended to myself that she loved me. Now I know
that she did not, but the warmer and more marvellous was her kindness to
me, her goodness, and nobility. Do you not think, Ivan Andreievitch,
that if you go deep enough in every human heart, there is this kernel of
goodness, this fidelity to some ideal. Do you know we have a pr