YMMV / Inexhaustible Chalice

• Complete Monster: The old landlord of Lyapunovka village is a Serial Rapist who uses his power over the peasants to rape every girl that catches his eye, including children. When one of his victims tries to hide from him under the stairs, the landlord stabs her through the eye while dragging her out. He also molests his preteen servant Ilya, forcing him to strip and perform obscene acts. The landlord drowns when Ilya is twelve, but the memories of him haunt Ilya for the rest of his life.
• Offending the Creator's Own: Apart for a period of atheism in his youth, Shmelyov has always affirmed himself to be an Orthodox Christian and is generally very popular among Orthodox readers. However, what with Ilya's adulterous love moving him to paint a wonderworking icon and the lifelike icons getting praised to the skies (even though it means Dramatically Missing the Point about Orthodox iconography, since Orthodox icons are not supposed to resemble realistic portraits, and the painters especially mustn't use models for the images of God and the saints), the reception of this novella among Shmelyov's target audience has been chilly to say the least.
• The Woobie: Ilya really, really needs a hug. When he's a child, he's molested by the old landlord. Then he spends a happy summer painting frescoes in the Vladychny Convent and befriends an Old Master iconographer, but never sees him again afterwards since the iconographers are Walking the Earth. After spending four years abroad, he returns to find himself a Stranger in a Familiar Land. He falls in love with an already-married woman who dies early, and he doesn't outlive her for long. On top of it all, most readers agree that what he believes to be his Orthodox religion is in fact a dangerous impassioned state of mind (which actual Orthodox theologians constantly warn about), since it's really a mix of his erotic fantasies about Anastasia, his dreams of joy, and his memories of the happy life in the Vladychny Convent and then in Europe: apparently, no one among his religious teachers could tell the difference, so there was no one to correct Ilya.

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