Gentle spirit

In the quiet wards of a St. Petersburg hospital, a doctor's fevered mind fixates on Krotka — a woman whose name means 'Timid' or 'Gentle', and whose true history he cannot stop trying to piece together. Dostoyevsky's novella is less about plot than about the act of looking: through unreliable narration, fragmented memory, and a narrator consumed by his own illness, it interrogates what can truly be known about another person.