You have picked an excellent story to study! This short
story asks us the haunting question about when it is best to show tenderness or
judgement to someone who has gone off the straight and narrow. Of course, any question
that asks which character you feel most sympathy for is going to receive many different
answers, depending on the person giving the answer, so you might want to move this to
the discussion post section of this group.
However, for me,
I think the character that I feel most sympathy for is actually Ivan Markovitch, Sasha's
uncle. He throughout the story argues for Sasha's side, because he believes in Sasha and
also thinks that he is just acting as a normal young man. However, after being the
reason why the family saves Sasha from imprisonment, he is forced to face his folly as
he sees Sasha once again fall into the same temptations as he fell into before. Notice
how Ivan Markovitch responds to Sasha's demand for
money:
Petrified, muttering something incoherent in his
horror, Ivan Markovitch took a hundred-ruble note out of his pocketbook and gave it to
Sasha.
At the end, the uncle
has no choice but to give in to his nephew's demands, for he has already shown him too
much lenience. The story shows that sometimes it is better to be cruel than to be
kind.
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