Summary Of What A Pity By Solzhenitsyn

The children in “The Father” experienced loss when their mother passed away, and Anna Modestovna from “What a Pity” experienced a similar loss when her father was sent away and imprisoned. Following the loss of the parents, their characters in each story exhibited a fear about something. In both “The Father” by Dobychin and “What a Pity” by Solzhenitsyn the characters’ loss of their parents created a sense of fear within them. In “What a Pity”, the narrator remarks, “Anna Modestovna knew people like this and she was afraid of them” (p33). When first reading this statement, I was confused as to why she was so fearful of a seemingly well-put together, confident man. Anna stands guard when the man comes near her without noticing her, which is an unusual reaction to have. When Anna lost her father, he was sent away for getting in trouble with the regime. Losing her father to this regime has made Anna very fearful of people who exude power because she considers these people as the ones who sent her father away. The lack of a father figure in her life could have also …show more content…
The first occurrence of this vulnerability and fear occurs when the boys are playing in the waves and the steamboat drives by. The boys see the women on the boat and immediately “put their hands between their knees and squeezed them together.” This could be perceived as the boys just being bashful like any other children are sometimes, but their lack of a mother figure in their life makes them less comfortable around the opposite gender. In the story it seems like the boys probably spend a lot of time with their father, since it is just the three of them on their outing. The boys are not used to hanging around women or girls and when they see them passing by on the boat they are immediately a bit fearful and bashful since they make the effort to conceal their