Sonia Marmeladov's full name is Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladov. In the novel "Crime and Punishment" she is mostly called Sonia.
Who is Sonia Marmeladov?
Sonia Marmeladov is a young girl of 18 years old who has to work as a prostitute to provide for her family - her drankard father, her stepmother and three children of her stepmother - Katerina Ivánovna.
Sonia lives a life full of humiliation and unjustice. But at the same time she is a faithful, religious. very kind person with a pure soul. She sacrifies her well-being in order to help her poor family.
The character of Sonia Marmeladov (Sonya Marmeladova) in "Crime and Punishment" is no doubt one of the most positive characters in this novel and in all Dostoevsky's works.
In this article you will find the quotes from the novel. These quotes can help you to understand the character of Sonia Marmeladov.
Sonia Marmeladov: the character in quotations
...Timidly and noiselessly a young girl made her way through the crowd, and strange was her appearance ...
...She, too, was in rags, her attire was all of the cheapest, but decked out in gutter finery of a special stamp, unmistakably betraying its shameful purpose.
...She forgot her fourth-hand, gaudy silk dress, so unseemly here with its ridiculous long train, and her immense crinoline that filled up the whole doorway, and her light-coloured shoes, and the parasol she brought with her, though it was no use at night, and the absurd round straw hat with its flaring flame-coloured feather. Under this rakishly-tilted hat was a pale, frightened little face with lips parted and eyes staring in terror.
Sonia was a small thin girl of eighteen with fair hair, rather pretty, with wonderful blue eyes.
...thin fingers...
...pale, thin, irregular, angular little face, those soft blue eyes, which could flash with such fire, such stern energy, that little body...
...It was Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladov. ... in such a dress, that his memory retained a very
different image of her. Now she was a modestly and poorly-dressed young girl, very young, indeed, almost like a child, with a modest and refined manner, with a candid but somewhat frightened-looking face. She was wearing a very plain indoor dress, and had on a shabby old- fashioned hat, but she still carried a parasol.
...She had a thin, very thin, pale little face, rather irregular and angular, with a sharp little nose and chin. She could not have been called pretty, but her blue eyes were so clear, and when they lighted up, there was such a kindliness and simplicity in her expression that one could not help being attracted.
...Her face, and her whole figure indeed, had another peculiar characteristic. In spite of her eighteen
years, she looked almost a little girl—almost a child. And in some of her gestures, this childishness seemed almost absurd.
(the author)
...Hurrah for Sonia! What a mine they’ve dug there! And they’re making the most of it! Yes, they are making the most of it! They’ve wept over it and grown used to it. Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!...
(Raskolnikov about Sonia and her family)
(Raskolnikov about Sonia's faith)
...She is a gentle creature with a soft little voice … fair hair and such a pale, thin little face...
...the daughter who gave herself for her cross, consumptive stepmother and for the little children of another? ... the daughter who had pity upon the filthy drunkard, her earthly father, undismayed by his beastliness...
...And meanwhile my daughter by my first wife has grown up; and what my daughter has had to put up with from her step-mother whilst she was growing up, I won’t speak of....
...Sonia, as you may well fancy, has had no education.
...she has read other books of romantic tendency and of late she had read with great interest a book
she got through Mr. Lebeziatnikov, Lewes’ Physiology—do you know it?... and that’s the whole of her education.
...When my own daughter first went out with a yellow ticket... for my daughter has a yellow passport...[note: in XIX century in Russia yellow pasport meant she was a prostitute]
...Sonia comes to us now, mostly after dark; she comforts Katerina Ivanovna and gives her all she can….
...a respectable poor girl ...
... she is respectable and has no special talent...
(Mr Marmeladov about his daughter, Sonia)
...childhood, while she lived with an unhappy father and a distracted stepmother crazed by grief, in the midst of starving children and unseemly abuse and reproaches...
(thoughts of Raskolnikov)
...how this shame and degradation can exist in you side by side with other, opposite, holy feelings? It would be better, a thousand times better and wiser to leap into the water and end it all!...
...How thin you are! What a hand! Quite transparent, like a dead hand....
(Raskolnikov to Sonia)
...It will be a year and a half ago soon since we found ourselves at last after many wanderings and numerous calamities in this magnificent capital...
(Mr. Marmeladov about his family coming to Saint Petersburg)
...‘But as for the money... I can always earn my own living....
(Sonia to Svidrigailov)
...How can you undertake such obligations so heedlessly, Sofya Semyonovna? It was Katerina Ivanovna’s debt and not yours... You can’t get through the world like that...
(Svidrigailov to Sonia about her kindness)
Sonya Marmeladova's room
... She has a room at the Kapernaumovs’ the tailors, she lodges with them...
(Mr Marmeladov about his daughter, Sonia)
...It was a large but exceedingly low-pitched room...
...Sonia's room looked like a barn; it was a very irregular quadrangle and this gave it a grotesque appearance. A wall with three windows looking out on to the canal ran aslant so that one corner formed a very acute angle, and it was difficult to see in it without very strong light. The other corner was disproportionately obtuse.
There was scarcely any furniture in the big room: in the corner on the right was a bedstead, beside it, nearest the door, a chair. A plain, deal table covered by a blue cloth stood against the same wall, close to the door into the other flat. Two rush-bottom chairs stood by the table. On the opposite wall near the acute angle stood a small plain wooden chest of drawers looking,
as it were, lost in a desert. That was all there was in the room.
The yellow, scratched and shabby wall- paper was black in the corners. It must have been damp and full of fumes in the winter.
There was every sign of poverty; even the bedstead had no curtain. Sonia looked in silence at her visitor, who was so attentively and unceremoniously scrutinising her room, and even began at last to tremble with terror, as though she was standing before her judge and the arbiter of her destinies.
(the author)
This is the character of Sonya Marmeladova (Sonia Marmeladov) in quotations from the novel "Crime and Punishment" of Dostoevsky.
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