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Updated: May 10, 2025
Nekhludoff recalled to his mind chains, shaved heads, fighting debauchery, the dying Kryltzoff, Katusha and the whole of her past, and he began to feel envious and to wish for what he saw here, which now seemed to him pure and refined happiness.
He went on, slowly letting the hurrying visitors pass before, and experiencing a mingled feeling of horror at the evil-doers locked up in this building, compassion for those who, like Katusha and the boy they tried the day before, must be here though guiltless, and shyness and tender emotion at the thought of the interview before him.
"The work that our life accomplishes, the whole of this work, the meaning of it is not, nor can be, intelligible to me. What were my aunts for? Why did Nikolenka Irtenieff die? Why am I living? What was Katusha for? And my madness? Why that war? Why my subsequent lawless life? To understand it, to understand the whole of the Master's will is not in my power.
While the peasant was kissing Nekhludoff and giving him a dark brown egg, the lilac dress of Matrona Pavlovna and the dear black head with the red bow appeared. Katusha caught sight of him over the heads of those in front of her, and he saw how her face brightened up. She had come out with Matrona Pavlovna on to the porch, and stopped there distributing alms to the beggars.
Perhaps in his heart he had already formed those evil designs against Katusha which his now uncontrolled animal self suggested to him, but he did not acknowledge this as his intention, but only wished to go back to the spot where he had been so happy, to see his rather funny, but dear, kind-hearted old aunts, who always, without his noticing it, surrounded him with an atmosphere of love and admiration, and to see sweet Katusha, of whom he had retained so pleasant a memory.
His Katusha Maslova, as she is more familiarly known in Resurrection is a far less appealing figure than the street-walker Sonia in Dostoïevsky's Crime and Punishment. The latter lives, while poor Maslova, a crude silhouette in comparison, as soon as she begins the march to Siberia is transformed into a clothes-horse upon which Tolstoy drapes his moral platitudes.
And what is Mary doing there?" he asked, nodding towards the corner where Mary Pavlovna sat. "She is combing out her adopted daughter's hair," replied Rintzeva. "But won't she let the insects loose on us?" asked Kryltzoff. "No, no; I am very careful. She is a clean little girl now. You take her," said Mary, turning to Rintzeva, "while I go and help Katusha, and I will also bring him his plaid."
She clung to him, put up her face, and met his kiss with her lips. Then the door again gave the same sort of snap and opened, and the voice of Matrona Pavlovna called out angrily, "Katusha!" She tore herself away from him and returned into the maids' room. He heard the latch click, and then all was quiet. The red light disappeared and only the mist remained, and the bustle on the river went on.
Once only, when, after the war, he went to see his aunts in hopes of meeting Katusha, and heard that soon after his last visit she had left, and that his aunts had heard she had been confined somewhere or other and had gone quite to the bad, his heart ached. According to the time of her confinement, the child might or might not have been his.
Evidently he brushed against Katusha through wishing to pass Nekhludoff at a respectful distance, and Nekhludoff was surprised that he, the clerk, did not understand that everything here, yes, and in all the world, only existed for Katusha, and that everything else might remain unheeded, only not she, because she was the centre of all.
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