Katerina Ivanovna Marmeladova

Marmeladov's second wife

Description: A widow with three children. About 30 years old. Slim, fairly tall and elegant woman, terribly emaciated, with beautiful dark-brown hair. Her cheeks were distinctly flushed with little red spots everywhere. Her lips were parched. Her eyes were blazing as if from a fever. Her consumptive and agitated face had a sickly look. 

Pronunciation

Part One

Chapter 2

This winter she caught a cold and started coughing, coughing up blood even. She has a weak chest and a tendency to consumption.

An educated person and a staff officer’s daughter. A person of noble heart and filled with elevated sentiments that have been refined by education. She is a high-minded and generous soul, but she is also unjust…

She was educated in a high-class school for noblemen’s daughters and danced the shawl dance in front of the governor and other important people, for which she was awarded a gold medal and a certificate of merit—a hot-headed, proud and demanding lady, irritable with a very short temper.

She married an infantry officer for love, running away from her parents’ home. He gambled, was prosecuted and died. He used to beat her. She was left in poverty with three small children. Cockrell’s footnote tells us that this was similar to the circumstances of Dostoyevsky’s first wife, Maria Isayeva (1824–64), after the death of her first husband.

Katerina Ivanovna was not kind to Sonya, her step-daughter, after her marriage to Marmeladov. She calls Sonya out for being a freeloader and tells her to follow up on enquiries made by Darya Frantsevna to become a prostitute.

She kisses Sonya’s feet after she comes home from her first job as a prostitute with 30 silver roubles.

Admonishes Marmeladov when he returns home and has a go at Raskolnikov for encouraging him.

Part Two

Chapter 7

Marmeladov is run over on the street and brought back to the apartment to die. Katerina Ivanovna’s health has deteriorated.

Part Five

Chapter 2

Funeral feast for Marmeladov. It’s a pantomime scene with her fighting with Amalia Lippewechsel, trying to one-up each other.

Chapter 3

The dinner scene from Chapter 2 continues with Luzhin having appeared at the end of the chapter. Katerina vociferously defends Sonya against Luzhin’s accusations of theft and ends up with the landlady Amalia giving her her marching orders from the apartment. She leaves, stating that she will find justice.