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.”)

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 let’s note that we’re only asking these questions (which, in turn, are causing the story to ask questions about the nature of love) because the length of each relationship was specified by the story and because Chekhov “remembered” or “took the trouble” to vary this parameter.

Once our stick figure has been fitted with a dening attribute, the story goes about putting that attribute to the test. “Once upon a time, a cheerfully obedient boy went out into the world.” And that’s what Alyosha does, there at the bottom of the first page, as the rising action begins: he goes to the home of a merchant, to whom his father has basically rented him out.

I like the Gottlieb-and-John story because it illuminates many of the gentle skills it takes to be truly receptive—particularly, the ability to be generous about human frailty, to be patient and let others emerge at their own pace—but it also illuminates the mental toughness that is sometimes required. The wise person is there not to be walked over but to stand up for the actual truth, to call the other person out when need be, if they are hiding from some hard reality. “Receptivity without confrontation leads to a bland neutrality that serves nobody,” the theologian Henri Nouwen wrote. “Confrontation without receptivity leads to an oppressive aggression which hurts everybody.”” (Brooks, “How to Know a

Person”, p.259)

“It’s about how to tell someone about their shortcomings in a way that offers maximal support. Let me give you a trivial, everyday example of why critiquing with care can be so effective. When I’m writing, I sometimes unconsciously know that a part of what I’m writing is not working. I have these vague vibrations that something is wrong, kind of like the vibrations you feel when you leave the house and you subtly sense you’ve left something important behind but you don’t know what. I often suppress these vibrations because I’m lazy or I want to be finished with the work. Invariably a good editor will locate the exact spot I semiconsciously knew wasn’t working. It’s only when the editor has named it for me that I fully face the fact that I need to make some changes. Critiquing with care works best when someone names something we ourselves almost but did not quite know. Critiquing with care works best when that naming happens within a context of unconditional regard, that just and loving attention that conveys unshakable respect for another person’s struggles.