Here we’d just about settled into a simple view of Marya as a completely innocent, blameless victim of a harsh system. But then the story says, “Well, hold on; isn’t one quality of a harsh system that it deforms the people within it and makes them complicit in their own destruction?” (Which is another way of saying: “Let’s not forget that Marya is a human being, and complicated, and susceptible to error.”)

When a writer subjects us to a non-normative event—a physical implausibility, the use of markedly elevated language (or markedly vernacular language), or a series of lengthy digressions in a Russian pub in which the people keep freezing in midaction for several pages so that each can be described at length, in turn—he pays a price: our reading energy drops. (We get suspicious and resistant.) But if it doesn’t drop fatally, and if, later, we see that this was all part of the plan—if what seemed a failure of craft turns out to be integral to the story’s meaning (that is, it seems that he “meant to do that”)—then all is forgiven and we might even understand the profitable exploitation of that apparent excess as a form of virtuosity.

But there is nothing enduring in this world, and that is why even joy is not as keen in the moment that follows the first; and a moment later it grows weaker still and finally merges imperceptibly into one’s usual state of mind, just as a ring on the water, made by the fall of a pebble, merges finally into the smooth surface. Kovalyov began to reflect and realized that the whole business was not yet over: the nose was found but it still had to be affixed, put in its proper place.

Who is Kovalyov before he loses his nose? A player, an egotist, an unreflective social climber, a name-dropper. How does the nose’s absence and its miraculous recovery change him? It doesn’t. Who is he once his nose goes back on his face? Same guy. “And from that time on”—as soon as his nose was restored—“Major Kovalyov went strolling about as though nothing had happened,” we are told. “And his nose too, as though nothing had happened, stayed on his face.” “Everything was all right, no part of him was missing.” (Or, in the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation, “he was in no way damaged.”) The last time we see Kovalyov, he’s doing the same thing he was doing when we first met him: pretending to a rank he hasn’t earned, by “buying himself the ribbon of some order, goodness knows why, for he hadn’t been decorated with any order.

A lot of the suffering we will witness in life will be greater than ours. There’s the question of what we can do to help and the different question of what to do when we can’t help. Often one thinks of another’s suffering: my dear friend you have so much life due you, how can this be happening? (I’m at Mass General waiting to see Emily.) For the sake of loyalty we keep in our minds the imagination of their private anguish. We cycle through all the emotions with them but often we also think—or behave as if we think—the abyss is remote for us.