Another gem by [a:Dostoyevsky|3137322|Fyodor Dostoyevsky|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1506003555p2/3137322.jpg] that displays his insight into the psychology of men, and perhaps, even more, his unique skill in uncovering the depths of our psyche through compelling narrative.

Quick, short read and perhaps a great introduction to Dostoyevsky, if you are not yet familiar with his canon. ( )

Just phenomenal. This author is just phenomenal: when I start reading him, I just can't put it down. So dark, and yet so transparent and honest - his writing offers interior glimpses that are all too rare into character types that are all too common. Fantastic. ( )

This bleak and puzzling story, originally published in 1876, is a tale of love gone wrong. Its narrator is a former army officer turned pawnbroker, who resigned from the army in disgrace to find that his brother-in-law had squandered the family's meagre fortune. Having clawed his way back to a semi-respectable style of living, he's embittered by the world and seeks to take his revenge on it. He decides to marry a quiet and put-upon orphaned teenager who comes to him trying to sell trinkets from a happier past; but he resolves to be stern with her. When she rushes to him, brimming over with affection, he puts her off; he encourages contemplation and silence; all the time thinking that he's creating a rational and deep connection between them - never realising that he is making her life so miserable that, one day, suicide may be the only option for her.

Dostoyevsky is not renowned for being a laugh a minute and, based on this story, it's a reputation that's well-deserved. At first I loathed the narrator, whose cold and clinical approach to love seems designed to torment his young wife - to make her, in microcosm, the butt of all the resentment he feels against the world at large. Then I began to feel for him: his tragic misunderstanding, his cowardice and his desperate attempts to revive a love that he has already crushed into ashes ('You don't know with what paradise I would have surrounded you. The paradise was in my soul; I would have planted it all around you!'). No, he isn't a straightforward villain. He's cruel without understanding the human heart, selfish, tyrannical and supercilious; but he's also a deeply wounded man whose claim to hate the world belies the fact that he cares deeply about rank and success. His determination to make money through business, and to retire to a life of comfortable wealth, has blinded him to the more delicate emotions and will, ultimately, deprive him of the chance of real happiness. No. It isn't exactly upbeat.

I should point out that this story is also often translated as A Gentle Creature. In fact, Penguin Classics published it by that title in their Penguin 60s Classics series, in a 1989 translation by David McDuff. This current version is translated by Ronald Meyer. ( )

A great short story with a depth that belies its length. The decision of the 'meek one' – a timid woman with a narcissistic husband – to commit suicide can be interpreted in many ways, and Dostoevsky's storytelling cleverly allows for all of these to be potentially true without committing to any one of them.

Is the husband's view the right answer – that she had "made too many promises" (pg. 53) and she had to decide whether to try and love the hardships life presented (as represented conceptually by the figure of her husband)? Was this meek, hunted, poverty-stricken girl not able to cope with the prospect of a richer life ahead of her, when life becomes not just bovine endurance but something you have to work out? Or is it that her husband's change of heart doomed her – she had come to terms with his aloofness, only for his narcissism to reassert itself again? After singing and becoming free, was it that she did not want to go back to belonging to him again?

Either way, it is a great little story that is readable enough not to exhaust you but deep enough to make it worth the reading. Dostoevsky knew about life and he wrote perceptively about it, and I can't help but wonder if, for him, it was not so much her death that was a tragedy, but her life of meekness: "she held her tongue, didn't throw down the money, took it – that's what poverty is" (pg. 3). Whether you choose life or death, it is when you take the reins for yourself that you transcend the poverty of your existence. ( )

Misogynistic man is surprised when his young wife commits suicide after he has treated her like crap for a year. Then he realises he loved her. ( )