Short story · 1876
A Gentle Creature
Кроткая
A pawnbroker recounts his young wife’s suicide — and his part in it.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky 1821 – 1881 · Russia As an Amazon Associate, The Put’ earns from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.
A pawnbroker sits beside the body of his young wife and tries to understand how it happened. Over the course of a single night he reconstructs their marriage — his pride, his control, her silence — and the moment he failed to see her. Dostoevsky called it a "fantastic story" and published it in his A Writer's Diary in 1876.
Only a few dozen pages long, it is an intense study of self-justification and of what a person cannot bring himself to see. In English it is also published as The Meek One.
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