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.

The woman accuses the man of “almost inhuman forgetfulness,” yet the necessity to forget is only human. What is truly inhuman is the woman’s refusal. She has the courage to keep her melodrama intact; the callousness to imprison another person in it. This is the cruelty of melodrama—like suicide, it neither doubts nor justifies its right to be.

More damaging than becoming a victim of political or historical turmoil is becoming the casualty of someone else’s memory. At the end of the novella, the man shudders. Who, then, lives in a real sorrow: the woman, who has maintained melodrama as the only form of her memory, or the man, who has been, and will always be, imprisoned by another person’s remembering?