Having seen the difference between Marya’s internally narrated version of herself and her actual position in the world, I find myself feeling more tenderness for her, and more protective of her. This more complicated, endangered Marya is the one I take with me to the end of the story.

Having recalled those memories, Marya is literally not the same person she was just seconds before. And we feel this as an escalation; suddenly, the person she used to be (beloved, special, cared for) wakes up into this scary new reality. We feel the shock of it. (“I’m a near-peasant teacher in a crummy provincial school? What? Me? Marya?”) but we also feel her joy at being restored to herself, to her real self.

What makes this such a human-scaled and heartbreaking description of loneliness, real loneliness, loneliness as it actually occurs in the world, is that we’ve watched Marya go through all of this from a position inside her. A story with less internality might have produced a simple feeling of pity (“Oh, that poor, lonely person”). We’d understand Marya as the Lesser Other. But the story’s virtuosic internality implicates her, even as it draws us in. She’s not a perfect person who is lonely. She’s an imperfect person who is lonely. We feel pity for lonely imperfect Marya in the same way we would feel pity for someone lonely and imperfect we loved, or for imperfect (lonely) us.

And look at that: the more I know about her, the less inclined I feel to pass a too-harsh or premature judgment. Some essential mercy in me has been switched on. What God has going for Him that we don’t is innite information. Maybe that’s why He’s able to, supposedly, love us so much.

I’d say there’s a general thesis in here somewhere: any story that suffers from what seems like a moral failing (that seems sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, pedantic, appropriative, derivative of another writer’s work, and so on) will be seen, with sufficient analytical snooping, to be suffering from a technical failing, and if that failing is addressed, it will (always) become a better story.