It's important to differ Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladov from the other Katerina Ivanovna from "The Brothers Karamazov". These women are different characters from two different novels.
In this article we are talking about the heroine of "Crime and Punishment" - Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladov.
Who is Katerina Ivanovna in "Crime and Punishment"?
Katerina Ivanovna is the wife of a drunkard ex clerk, Mr. Marmeladov and is also the stepmother of famous Sonia Marmeladov (also - Sonya Marmeladova, Sonechka).
Katerina Ivanovna is about 30 years old but already has 3 children from her first marriage. Being a widow she got married to Mr. Marmeladov because of poverty and desperation.
Katerina Ivanovna is about 30 years old but already has 3 children from her first marriage. Being a widow she got married to Mr. Marmeladov because of poverty and desperation.
She is a well educated woman but after her first marriage she fell into the poverty and was rejected by her parents family. Katerina Ivanovna and Mr. Marmeladov met in a provincial town where they got married.
More than a year ago The Marmeladovs arrived to Saint Petersburg. But Mr. Marmeladov lost his job because of alcohol addiction.
Katerina Ivanovna is in consumption and feels worse every day. She starts losing her mind because of her consumption (as a side effect).
Tragedy of Katerina Ianovna
The life of Katerina Ivanovna is quite tragical. First she becomes a widow when she is about 26 years. Then she marries Mr. Marmeladov who does not make her life any easier.
One day Mr. Marmeladov dies in an accident - he was drunk and he was run over by a horse.
One day Mr. Marmeladov dies in an accident - he was drunk and he was run over by a horse.
Unfortunately on the day of Mr. Marmeladov's funeral Katerina Ivanovna tragically dies from consumption bleeding after falling on the road. Her three children become orphans.
The character of Katerina Ivanovna in quotes
These quotes can help you to have a better understanding of who is Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova from "Crime and Punishment".
"...She was a rather tall, slim and graceful woman, terribly emaciated, with magnificent dark brown hair and with a hectic flush in her cheeks.
She was pacing up and down in her little room, pressing her hands against her chest; her lips were parched and her breathing came in nervous broken gasps.
Her eyes glittered as in fever and looked about with a harsh immovable stare. And that consumptive and excited face with the last flickering light of the candle-end playing upon it made a sickening impression.
She seemed to Raskolnikov about thirty years old and was certainly a strange wife for Marmeladov…
... 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.
... She was ... driven to distraction by her illness and the crying of the hungry children...
...For that’s Katerina Ivanovna’s character, and when children cry, even from hunger, she falls to beating them at once.
... I am a pig, but she is a lady! ... Katerina Ivanovna, my spouse, is a person of education and an officer’s daughter.
...she is a woman of a noble heart, full of sentiments, refined by education. And yet … oh, if only she felt for me!
(the author)
... and we live in a cold room and she caught cold this winter and has begun coughing and spitting blood too.
...We have three little children and Katerina Ivanovna is at work from morning till night; she is scrubbing and cleaning and washing the children, for she’s been used to cleanliness from a child. But her chest is weak and she has a tendency to consumption and I feel it!
... Katerina Ivanovna, though she is magnanimous, she is unjust...
...I have sold her very stockings for drink? Not her shoes—that would be more or less in the order of things, but her stockings, her stockings I have sold for drink!
...Her mohair shawl I sold for drink, a present to her long ago, her own property, not mine;
... my wife was educated in a high-class school for the daughters of noblemen, and on leaving she danced the shawl dance before the governor and other personages for which she was presented with a gold medal and a certificate of merit. The medal...well, the medal of course was sold—long ago...
... she is a lady of spirit, proud and determined. She scrubs the floors herself and has nothing but black bread to eat, but won’t allow herself to be treated with disrespect. to her feelings than from the blows.
...She was a widow when I married her, with three children, one smaller than the other. She married her first husband, an infantry officer, for love, and ran away with him from her father’s house. She was exceedingly fond of her husband; but he gave way to cards, got into trouble and with that he died. He used to beat her at the end: and although she paid him back, of which I have authentic documentary evidence, to this day she speaks of him with tears and she throws him up to me...
... And she was left at his death with three children in a wild and remote district where I happened to be at the time; and she was left in such hopeless poverty that, although I have seen many ups and downs of all sort, I don’t feel equal to describing it even.
Her relations had all thrown her off. And she was proud, too, excessively proud…. And then, honoured sir, and then, I, being at the time a widower, with a daughter of fourteen left me by my first wife, offered her my hand, for I could not bear the sight of such suffering.
You can judge the extremity of her calamities, that she, a woman of education and culture and distinguished family, should have consented to be my wife. But she did! Weeping and sobbing and wringing her hands, she married me! For she had nowhere to turn!
...She had not any dresses … none at all...
...Katerina Ivanovna is full of generous feelings, she is a spirited lady, irritable and short—tempered…
... Katerina Ivanovna walking up and down and wringing her hands, her cheeks flushed red, as they always are in that disease...
(Mr. Marmeladov about his wife, Katerina Ivanovna)
Children of Katerina Ivanovna: the quotes
"...The youngest child, a girl of six, was asleep, sitting curled up on the floor with her head on the sofa.
A boy a year older stood crying and shaking in the corner, probably he had just had a beating.
Beside him stood a girl of nine years old, tall and thin, wearing a thin and ragged chemise with an ancient cashmere pelisse flung over her bare shoulders, long outgrown and barely reaching her knees.
Her arm, as thin as a stick, was round her brother’s neck. She was trying to comfort him, whispering something to him, and doing all she could to keep him from whimpering again.
At the same time her large dark eyes, which looked larger still from the thinness of her frightened face, were watching her mother with alarm.
(the author)
These are the quotes about the character of Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova from the novel "Crime and Punishment" of Dostoevsky, a famous psychological thriller.
No comments:
Post a Comment