That is why the very joys are poisoned for them <…> to such an extent that circumstances were able to humiliate them in their own opinion <…> The story is written passionately and leaves a deep impression on the reader. ”It is assumed that Koni could express not so much his own opinion as the opinion of Mikhail Dostoevsky himself, who evaded a direct assessment of the work of his brother, with whom he was very close at that time, to the point that they collaborated together on Kraevsky’s magazine and attended meetings together at Petrashevsky’s. The critic of Otechestvennye Zapiski Stepan Dudyshkin also had a positive attitude towards the story, placing it on a par with the best works of 1848, which also included Dostoevsky’s White Nights, Apollon Maikov’s Picnic in Florence, Ivan Turgenev’s Sketches of a Hunter and the comedy Where It’s Thin, It Breaks, and Ivan Goncharov’s Ivan Savvich Podzhabrin.
The critic of Sovremennik magazine Pavel Annenkov, on the contrary, had a negative opinion of Weak Heart. In a review of Russian literature in 1848, he wrote: «The literary independence given to an occasion, although possible, but extremely private, somehow strikes you as strange.» The critic objected to Dostoevsky’s depiction of the love between Vasya Shumkov and Arkasha Nefedovich: «vague, tearful, exaggerated to such an extent that for the most part it is not believed, but rather seems like a trick of the author, who decided to try his hand at this plot.»
After the publication of Dostoevsky’s collected works in 1860, Nikolai Dobrolyubov in the article «The Downtrodden People» also mentioned the story «Weak Heart», despite the fact that it was not included in this collected works. The critic was interested exclusively in the social significance of the writer’s works. In his opinion, Dostoevsky was solving the question of «what general conditions develop inertia in human society to the detriment of the activity and mobility of forces.»
Dobrolyubov explained the main conflict of the story «Weak Heart» as follows: «The ideal theory of the social mechanism, with the calming of all people in their place and in their work, does not at all ensure general well-being. It is true that if there had been a typewriter in Vasya’s place, it would have been excellent. But the point is that you can never improve a person to such a degree that he becomes a complete machine <…>. There are instincts that do not yield to any form, any oppression and cause a person to do things that are completely inappropriate, through which, in the usual order of things, they constitute his misfortune»
