“Another soul is a closed book” (experience of family conflict interpretation in the F. M. Dostoevsky’s story “The Meek One”)

Abstract

F. M. Dostoevsky’s story “The Meek One,” whose plot consists of the suicide of a young woman, requires a new interpretation without one-sidedness and a moralistic attitude towards the characters and relative to the writer’s intentions, who saw the keen internal spiritual struggle in every hero. The suicide occurred due to a conflict between a husband, pawnbroker in a usurious company, and his young wife. The core of the conflict is the struggle of two arrogant people having the negative experience of an abused and degraded life and trying to defend their human dignity by abusing… their significant other. We cannot claim that the husband and wife do not have positive features, because the wife is “meek” and virtuous as well as honest towards herself and her husband turned out to be able to love her to the bottom of his heart after recognizing his fatal mistakes in relation to her (the aspiration to love himself, demonstrating coldness and disengagement together with the attempts of a bossy moral-pedagogical training which ultimately mentally harmed and resulted in her becoming a moral-psychological “emotional wreck).” He deeply suffered from feeling guilty and decided to radically change the life of his family, abandoning his “shameful” occupation and moving to another place. However “the meek one” was not able to appreciate his spiritual-moral degeneration and accept him from a sense of false moralism and aberration of conscience. The suicide of his beloved wife overwhelmed the man, by design of the writer, and having survived total loneliness, a radical transition towards the highest spiritual values emerged in his consciousness.