An Analysis of A Gentle Spirit by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A 19-minute read
Dostoyevsky’s short story, titled often in English “A Gentle Spirit”, was first brought to my attention in the context that many readers discuss the perplexity behind the girl’s motivations for taking her own life. Upon reading, I think the bigger mystery may be why readers find her death mysterious at all. The narrative reads as an illustration of methodical emotional abuse, and suicide is merely a logical probability in the face of such psychological warfare.
Before we get to the meat of the analysis, I think it important to explore the nuance within the title of the story itself. Dostoyevsky did not happen upon the name accidentally. It’s unfortunate that the English titles, “A Gentle Spirit” or “The Meek One”, lose the subtleties of the succinct and impactful Russian title, “Kроткая”, the feminine form of the adjective “кроткий”, and a word with many definitions and abstractions. Кроткая, pronounced krotkaya, is far more than simply “gentle” or “meek” as it is in English—it is a word with theological weight, used in Orthodox Christian texts in place of “meek”. In the Western world, one is inclined to see “meek” as a dirty word—one who is spineless, who enables, who tolerates without courage, who is conflict avoidant, weak, passive. But in Christianity (something Dostoyevsky oft writes about in his personal journals), meekness is considered virtue; a strength of restraint, to suffer without rebellion or bitterness, to possess a quiet and uncomplaining spirit.
The Greek word in original Christian texts was “πραΰτης”, said prautes, which was used in the Bible in, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5). It has connotations of discipline and a deliberate restraint of power in service to God. The weight of the word is supported by the concepts of gentleness, humility, and self-control, particularly in the face of provocation or when one has the power to retaliate, but chooses not to. Christian meekness is about controlled strength, not the absence thereof. Moses is called to be the meekest man on earth (Numbers 12:3), yet he was a powerful man who confronted Pharaoh and led a nation. The meek person doesn’t defend their honour because they have already surrendered it, instead gaining freedom from being controlled by anger, pride, and vainglory, which provides detachment from the very mental constructs that allow one to take offence in the first place. It is not enablement or cowardice: Christ described himself as “meek and lowly in heart” (Matthew 11:29), yet overturned tables in the temple, called the Pharisees a “brood of vipers”, and refused to back down in the face of powerful authorities, suffering—willingly—a long, torturous, humiliating death.
Кроткая conveys a cluster of meanings in the same way which don’t translate directly into English, including the idea of being long-suffering with patience and without complaint, an uncomplaining and unprotesting spirit, a spiritual tenderness, a submissiveness that comes from inner peace rather than fear, a childlike innocence, or a quietness as someone who doesn’t raise their voice or make demands. It’s no longer an everyday word in Russian, but has liturgical connotations, and so when a Russian hears this word, they may—importantly—think first of the icon of Theotokos (the Virgin Mary) or of saints and martyrs. It is the one who endures.
Importantly, in the 19th Century around the time Dostoyevsky was penning much of his work, кроткая represented the feminine ideal—a patient, uncomplaining, self-sacrificing woman—while still bearing the weight of the cruelty the endurance entails. Naming the story so, Dostoyevsky evokes images of saintliness, vulnerability, feminine suffering, while the story itself raises an interesting question: which kind of meek was the girl?
Turning to the narrator of the story, our main character, the pawn shop owner, he gives us more insights into who he is by what he omits than what he says. He’s highly self-conscious, manipulative, and talks excessively about himself: his likes and dislikes, desires, plans, and judgments. But his words are a weak attempt to control the surrounding narrative, though his actions rarely seem to match many of these self-descriptions. “Only once I allowed myself to scoff at her things. You see, I never allow myself to behave like that. I keep up a gentlemanly tone with my clients: few words, politeness and severity,” he tells us as he recounts his tale of woe. Frequently, the narrator feels the need to inform us of who he is, what kind of person he is. Though, it is his absence of good words for others that is most telling.
What is most interesting is that he takes—ironically—great pride in admitting his faults. Somehow his admissions sound like boasts, and he knows it. The aunts were horrid, the grocer was cruel, the regiment officer was a “crawling man”; we never hear from him a single praise—or even neutral comment—for another person, outside a certainly restrained remark about the girl being attractive. Yet, he excuses his being a braggadocio by saying he only says bad things about himself—an obvious dishonesty.
“As it was the day after her ‘mutiny’, I received her sternly. Sternness with me takes the form of dryness,” he says of the girl taking her item to another pawn shop, choosing extreme words such as “mutiny”, and apparently considering it important to describe his sternness to her in chastising his customer for going elsewhere after he mocks her possession. On other occasions, he makes guesses about her character and motivations without asking her a single question about herself. “When she came, I entered into affable conversation with her, speaking with unusual politeness. I have not been badly brought up and have manners. Hm. It was then I guessed that she was soft-hearted and gentle.” He himself tells us he has determined her to be soft-hearted and gentle from the beginning, yet following marriage, she is defiant, stubborn, snooty, and wanting—by his words, yet not her actions. He shows what is ostensibly care for her just once, during a long and arduous illness that brings her to death’s door. During the most severe period of this time, he fretted, provided quality medical care, yet withdrew again as soon as her recovery was imminent. She was merely a possession to him, and no miser can tolerate a loss.
Through many of his self-indulgent ramblings, we experience his worldview: the world is against him, he was hated from birth, and this somehow places him above others. I suffer, therefore I am entitled. And though we see a glimpse of true self-awareness when he admits his stories of his military career were fabrications from cowardice and shame, he seems to truly believe in his own righteousness through self-inflicted suffering and his own victimhood. Renaming “The Narrator” more appropriately, he shall thus be, “The Unreliable Narrator”.
The blooming courtship in the pawn shop is designed, semi-consciously, by the narrator to establish control over the object of his desires. Though he seems to believe his own framing to some degree, the intentional strategic planning on how to “train” the girl cannot be ignored. From the very beginning, we can surmise that the narrator feels sorrow for the girl, and this pathos is what draws his interest: she’s pitiable. But as he waxes about his growing interest in her, he foreshadows the progressing story: the narrator only ever, exclusively, considers his own feelings. Frequently, he makes assumptions about how the girl must feel, why she must do this or that, as he does with all others he mentions during his recounting.
What he perceives as his growing romantic interest, appears more as a haughty sense of condescension over her pathetic condition as he takes more interest in her reactions than her emotions, thoughts, or inner workings and motivations. A telling example is the scene wherein he offers her two roubles for an item, which we are told by him is rather generous. His satisfaction in getting to mock her about her low-grade item is unveiled, and rather, boasted. The mockery is a “triumph” over her—one of which he ponders the value, though he quickly decides her humiliation is indeed worth two roubles. His further ridicule and degradation of her psychologically is—in his own words—to test her. Each item she brings, he disdains with language such as “poor”, “trashy”, “rubbishy”, or “rags”.
“The gentle and soft-hearted do not resist long, and though they are by no means very ready to reveal themselves, they do not know how to escape from a conversation; they are niggardly in their answers, but they do answer, and the more readily the longer you go on. Only, on your side you must not flag, if you want them to talk.” He espouses his upbringing and good manners, though blatantly describes tactics of manipulation, exposing his view of her as a form of entertainment, something to conquer. By his own admission, he takes pleasure in this game of cat and mouse, evidenced by these microcosms in the pawn shop—without which, we may misunderstand the cause of the girl’s ultimate demise. Dostoyevsky has cleverly created a character who, on the surface, may seem a relatively normal person, though perhaps mildly dislikable, but when one reads between the lines, pays attention to every word, watches for every action, one can see a character with underlying egocentric and merciless traits, awaiting prey.
“And so it was, two days later, she came in again, such a pale little creature, all agitation—I saw that something had happened to her at home, and something really had. I will explain directly what had happened, but now I only want to recall how I did something chic, and rose in her opinion.” The narrator witnesses that something had happened to the girl, and it was something worthy of her upset, but it’s unimportant for now—he needs to gloat about his self-perceived savoir faire first. Her pain is secondary to his ego. Additionally, even though he repeatedly mentions her plight, he never describes it; he takes no interest in her as a human being. The most damning evidence of all comes in the narrator’s declaration that, “… above all, I looked upon her then as mine and did not doubt of my power.”
The narrator is arrogant, bumptious, and constantly comparing himself to others. The girl’s aunts were horrid; he says she told him they beat her and conspired to sell her, but with them, she managed to study and pass an exam to better herself. We hear that a 50-year-old man has his eye on the girl as a third wife, but he was wicked and cruel; therefore the girl desperately resorted to advertising herself to work in increasingly demeaning conditions. The narrator mentions the grocer’s age as negative and disgraceful, though later reveals himself to be—hypocritically—in his early forties. Yet, it is established the protagonist is an unreliable narrator, and our portraits of other characters are painted only by him. Nevertheless, it’s true we can assume the aunts and the older man were likely poor options for the girl considering how long it took her to decide between them and the narrator—or rather, the drawn-out decision-making tells us much about how the girl perceived the protagonist.
It’s possible that the narrator truly thought he loved the girl, when it fact he treated her as a victim to ensnare and belittle, and himself an apex predator. However, this is not the behaviour of someone who loves, but one who is attached to an object they possess. As this facsimile of a romantic relationship unfolds after marriage in the pawn shop, the insidious behaviour of the narrator becomes more apparent: he ensures the girl feels beneath him, despite his theatrical declaration of his own faults during the proposal. At every turn, he quenches her enthusiasm, refrains from complimenting her, withholds companionship and conversation, refuses her affection, meanwhile justifying himself by painting her previous life as one of degradation. He turns a blind eye to the cruelty of his own behaviour: “…the best of it was that, from the very beginning, she rushed to meet me with love, greeted me with rapture. When I went to see her in the evening, told me in her chatter (the enchanting chatter of innocence) all about her childhood and girlhood, her old home, her father, and mother. But I poured cold water upon all that at once. That was my idea. I met her enthusiasm with silence—friendly silence, of course… but, all the same, she could quickly see that we were different and that I was an enigma. And being an enigma was what I made a point of most of all!”
The narrator noticeably relishes the authority over her owing to the age gap, the fact he owned the business and property, that he was the manager (as opposed to a provider, one might say). Under all this, the narrator appears to hold a deep fear of being understood, perhaps of being seen for who he really is. And this comes before all, including her apparent need for connection. As with everyone else in the story he mentions, he dehumanises the girl. He tells us she is proud, and informs us that “Proud people are particularly nice when… well, when one has no doubt of one’s power over them, eh”. Lukerya also briefly mentioned the girl was proud before the marriage, though the context suggests her intention was to convey that the girl has trouble asking for help or expressing her needs, letting herself rely on others—and this trait is precisely what the narrator both cultivates and exploits in the girl. This pride is a rather different flavour compared to the inflated sense of self-worth found within the narrator.
“Taking her into my house, I wanted all her respect. I wanted her to be standing before me in homage for the sake of my sufferings—and I deserved it.” Here again we see the attitude: I suffer; therefore I am entitled. The narrator has great pity for himself, appearing to believe his own pain gives him the right to inflict pain on others, to be resentful of others, to be owed by the world. This fragile sense of self fuels his callousness towards the girl, by whom he’s determined to not be understood. Refusing to divulge information about himself, he is aggrieved when he discovers his now-wife has been learning about him from others. While not excusing her behaviour, it’s worth noting that her marriage offered her no companionship or warmth, and so she began spending time with another man with whom she could laugh and talk, and it seems this time was often spent simply learning about her husband or holding intelligent discussions about political life. “But then I married. Whether it was by chance or not, I don’t know. But when I brought her into my home, I thought I was bringing a friend, and I needed a friend so much. But I saw clearly that the friend must be trained, schooled, even conquered. Could I have explained myself straight off to a girl of sixteen with her prejudices?”
He questions how he could explain himself to a sixteen-year-old girl, as though she could never understand him without prior training, though he creates of her an unintelligible image. He first relates that “from the very beginning, she rushed to meet me with love, greeted me with rapture,” though later he says, “At first she argued—oh, how she argued—but afterwards she began to be silent, completely silent, in fact, only opened her eyes wide as she listened; such big, big eyes, so attentive. And… and what is more, I suddenly saw a smile, mistrustful, silent, an evil smile. Well, it was with that smile on her face, I brought her into my house.” But pay close attention to the girl’s actions compared to the narrator’s embellished accounts, abundant adjectives, and flourishes of judgement and subjectivity: he silences her, is cold, douses her excitement, and claims to be doing it in the name of “happiness” and “respect”. His account has her becoming more defiant as his time went on, but we see that she had been silenced vocally and could protest through nothing more than stamping her foot or leaving the dwelling—all of which the narrator met with more silence and another cold shoulder. Her “defiance” is nothing more than a projection to fit his narrative. Her actions, in fact, portray someone quite emotionally restrained, despite his describing her as being in a “frenzy” or “hysterical”.
Everything inside the property was his, the girl’s thoughts were dismissed or stifled, her opinions unheard, and she was punished like a child for varying degrees of trespass. The narrator deprived her of work and agency for deviating from his expectations, and attempted to confine her as a pet on a leash: “The fact is, she had not the right to walk out of the house. Nowhere without me, such was the agreement before she was married.”
A poignant contradiction is unearthed when the narrator claims that the girl despises his miserliness—he admits he refused her everything except the necessities such as linens—yet names himself the “most generous of men”. We can discern that he was comfortably wealthy; during a time when 300 roubles were about half a year’s salary for a middle-tier civil servant or a minor official, he could spend it without flinching in a single day to find her when she left home. He could additionally pay the aunts 100 roubles each merely to satisfy them. Yet, her pale complexion from the beginning of the story never resolved, and she remained thin. The fact that she remained this way and eventually became deathly ill suggests she may have been malnourished despite the narrator’s relative wealth, while the narrator himself remains healthy and spry from what we can tell.
He makes his satisfaction explicit when he says, “she was so conquered, so humiliated, so crushed, that sometimes I felt agonies of pity for her, though sometimes the thought of her humiliation was actually pleasing to me. The thought of our inequality pleased me.” This is what the narrator tells us after the episode with the gun. The girl, supposedly at her wit’s end, appears to be considering a sinister escape from her plight, though she ultimately thought better thereof—possibly she couldn’t live with the guilt, or perhaps the intention wasn’t there to begin with. As the narrator lays in bed, the girl holds his gun to his temple. His eyes flickered open, then quickly shut tight as he lay terrified and pondering whether she had noticed. At that moment, had she noticed his alertness, it’s possible the roles were reversed, and now she saw him as the pitiable one—the coward who can’t face death, despite bragging about his military career. Regardless, the scene is tragic; a little girl, married to a middle-aged man, psychologically broken, is described as undeniably “conquered”. He won not just the battle, but now the war.
Due to her rash behaviour, like a newspaper to a dog’s nose, the narrator relegates the girl to a cast iron bed in another room. A near-fatal illness begins to grip her, her pale complexion faded to even white lips. Yet, the narrator continues to ignore her for weeks until death became a legitimate possibility—only then would he spend money on her, under threat of losing her as his property, as any miser may feel. Even during emergency, he thinks only of himself.
The near-death experience is enough to jolt the narrator into action, yet he doesn’t change, but instead reverts to frigidity upon her recovery. It is not until a day he notices her singing to herself that he has what seems—on the surface—an epiphany. In a fit of seeming rapture, he throws himself at her feet, kissing them, showering her with condemnation of himself, and frightening the fragile girl with declarations of what amounts to worship. Alas, he hasn’t changed; he merely reverses, in one aspect, the psychological roles of master and slave. But she is still the slave: he continues to treat her as an object, to make all decisions without her input, remains unable to ask her what she thinks, feels, needs, or desires. The narrator couldn’t love her, a girl who likely had not known love for much of her life, and perhaps now believes she doesn’t deserve it. And she couldn’t love him. She was broken. Hope was lost. Even when something changes, nothing really does.
The described mechanics of the relationship between the narrator and the girl, unfortunately, are illustrative of how it works in many abusive relationships; the abuser injects into casual remarks, judgements, adjectives, and descriptions deliberately designed to paint a very particular image of the victim. This impression binds the sufferer, unable to find credence, unable to speak out and be heard, self-censoring, for fear of being called a liar. In her aunts’ house, she attained an education, could freely come and go, and could apply for work, which fuelled the burning hope she could eventually live a better life. With the narrator, the girl is trapped. Physically in the house, socially without connection or friends, emotionally without affection or support, and practically with no work or means to earn, confined to her bed, sewing day in and day out with her sickly complexion and singing with a weakened voice. With the narrator, she had nothing: no escape, no hope; she despaired, with only death as release.
Clutching her prized icon of the Theotokos (the Virgin Mary)—so cherished that when she felt forced by circumstances to sell it, she couldn’t bring herself to pull it apart for more money—she throws herself from what she sees as one inescapable fate to another. The narrator’s faith is for show; he displays his icon altar at the front of the shop where customers can see, which aligns with the evidence we see consistently that he’s highly aware of himself and is constantly trying to portray himself in a particular way and manipulate. The girl’s faith, on the other hand, no matter how misguided, may have been sincere. Perhaps she didn’t know that there’s no ability to continuously seek redemption and salvation after suicide. Or perhaps she knows and prayed before death to receive mercy anyway. Maybe, she saw eternal non-existence, separation from God, as better than her lived experience. Or possibly, it was her naïve youth that lost sight of why Christians are expected to persevere through suffering. The girl, it may be easy to forget, is a child. Losing her parents at 13, and knowing only suffering at the hands of authority figures since then, what could she possibly know of the world?
To give some context, in Orthodox Christianity, suicide is seen as a particularly grave sin because it is seen as murder against oneself, and by its very nature, it forecloses one’s ability to repent and confess, while the soul departs in the very act. In Orthodox theology, the body is considered a temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19), and life itself is not the possession of the individual of which to dispose. Existence is a gift of God, and to reject existence is to reject God. However, it’s also important to bear in mind that Orthodoxy has a concept of “economia”, that is Divine Economy, a pastoral flexibility that can acknowledge diminished culpability, such as a person not in full possession of their faculties. This person is considered differently than one who acted in full, coherent deliberation and despair. Despair itself, differing from grief or sorrow, is seen as a spiritual illness.
It’s worth noting that during Dostoyevsky’s time, he watched suicide become almost fashionable among his contemporaries, the Russian intelligentsia of the late 19th century. In his Diary of a Writer, Dostoyevsky writes about suicide with great horror and an analytical edge, exploring a generation of intellectual elites high on the idea of nihilism, moral decadence, materialism, and imported Western ideologies such as Schopenhauer’s pessimism. As he saw it, suicide was the logical endpoint, for many of his peers, of a worldview that abandoned God. Dostoyevsky explores themes of suicide and repentance in other works, but A Gentle Spirit notably ventures into the territory of a less grand despair—not the grand, theatrical nihilistic gesture of despair, but one of quiet suffering. It is the despair of someone crushed under the weight of the ego of another, burdened by social powerlessness, and a marriage divorced from love.
Importantly, the girl doesn’t leave a note explaining her suicide. Dostoyevsky had written about the “reasoned” suicide notes common in his era and found them disturbing that one could leave an explainer documenting the lack of purpose and reason to continue coherently, rationally, calmly. The emotional coldness was frightening more than passion or despair because, to Dostoyevsky, it was a sign that humans had wholly divorced themselves from spiritual life. As opposed to the popular ideals of the Enlightenment spreading from the West, Dostoyevsky saw people thinking, rationalising, their way into eternal oblivion. To him, resurrection is what made human suffering coherent and love sensible. In a notable case of suicide of which Dostoyevsky wrote, a girl jumped from a window clutching an icon, which he explained demonstrates that the girl did not die in despair of God, but of people and the social order.
The narrator tells us his tale, contemplates their life, tries to make sense of the girl taking her own life. Yet, his callousness and self-absorption know no bounds. “Allow me, I knew that a woman, above all at sixteen, must be in complete subordination to a man. Women have no originality.” “What does it prove that she is lying there in the outer room? Truth is truth.” Here lies his wife, dead by her own hand, yet he critiques the creativity of her despair. Seeing himself as without sin, free of wrongdoing, released from blame, he never considers for a moment whether he is a man to which it’s worth being subordinate, nor what was stirring inside his late wife. Instead, he ponders his own feelings, laments his imminent loneliness, and finally claims that Lukerya is not allowed to leave due to his desire for companionship (albeit, a rather twisted definition thereof), transferring his focus from one possession to another.
Why did the girl kill herself? There is rarely just a single reason for suicide. Methodical abuse, isolation, no escape, vulnerability in age and disposition, and broken hope—the only question that remains is why readers would find her suicide mysterious. Perhaps, like in reality, they believe the narrator’s framing of her as “defiant” and “proud”, rather than broken and fragile. The “gentle spirit” of this story was shattered by someone who saw meekness as a weakness to exploit. The story shows us exactly how psychological abuse works: the abuser controls not just the victim’s life, but the narrative about them, even in death. The title tacitly asks which kind of meek the girl was, but the answer from Dostoyevsky is complex: it’s possible the girl had the capacity for true meekness. Yet, what is required for true meekness is inner peace. The narrator impeded peace, preventing her from ever letting her natural meekness develop into what it was meant to be, and her age left her inexperienced and vulnerable. The girl was in no condition to deliberate and reason her suicide, but—consistent with her quiet, long-suffering nature—she left the world not with a grand and nihilistic gesture or a well-reasoned note, but spiritually broken and without a whisper.