Marya Timofeyevna Lebyadkina

Who She Is

Marya Timofeyevna Lebyadkina is the sister of Captain Ignat Lebyadkin, the lame and mad woman of the Filippov house, and the lawful wife of Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin: they married in Petersburg, nearly five years before the party, with Alexei Kirillov and Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky as witnesses, and she is a virgin (ch. I, Part Two, ch. X, Part Two). She is about thirty, sickly thin, in a dark calico dress, with her long neck bare and her thin hair tied in a little bun, whitened and painted, and she lives among a candle, a little mirror, an old deck of cards, a torn songbook, and a German roll bitten once (ch. IV, Part One). Her brother beats her and does not feed her; the old woman from the lodge brings her something out of charity. Her nearly daily nervous fits wipe out her memory and make her redo everything in her own way, and she spends hours daydreaming (ch. IV, Part One). What she wants, for herself, is little and precise: to kiss the hand of whoever treats her well, and to wait for the falcon, the prince (ch. IV, Part One, ch. II, Part Two). What she fears is dusk, the hour when memory returns along with her weeping for her son, and for five years, day and night, the great guilt she carries before her husband without knowing what it is (ch. IV, Part One, ch. II, Part Two). What she knows, and tells him to his face, is that the flesh-and-blood man was ashamed of her in front of a society girl, and that the prince she was waiting for would never have been ashamed (ch. II, Part Two). Where she is wrong, or right without knowing it, is in calling him an impostor: there is no throne, and there is a fact (ch. II, Part Two). She is stabbed to death, fallen by the door, which shows she fought while awake (ch. III, Part Three).

Trajectory

In ch. III, Part One she first appears as a subject of talk: Liputin tells Stepan Trofimovich that the captain's mad sister is whipped with a Cossack nagaika morning and night, that Kirillov tore the nagaika away and broke it, and that the captain collects a fee every year from the man who seduced her. In ch. IV, Part One, at the Filippov house, Shatov takes the chronicler to see her in secret while the brother sleeps on the floor. She greets them with joy; she calls Shatov "Shatuchka," asks when he last combed his hair, and combs it with a comb she takes from her pocket. She says she finds it funny that he is so grave: anguish is not boredom, and she is cheerful. She tells the story of the convent, where the mother superior did not believe in Blessed Lizaveta, walled up in a cage for seventeen years, and where she herself said that for her God and nature are the same thing, and everyone exclaimed. An old penitent woman whispered to her, as she left the church, the words that marked her:

She tells him that she climbs a mountain, falls to the ground, and weeps without knowing the time, and that when the sun sets her memory returns, and with it the weeping for her son. Shatov asks whether there was a son, and she says yes: a small one, rosy, with tiny nails. She wrapped him in cambric and lace, prayed, carried him through the forest unbaptized, and threw him into a lake:

When he asks whether it really happened, she says it is hard to say and that she weeps just the same, and she changes the subject. She asks why he never asks her anything, and says that if he asked nicely she might tell him, but that she will not tell even if they kill her. On Sunday, at the cathedral, the chronicler recounts that he arrived in a hired cart, paid the driver four kopecks, said it was all he had, and went in with a paper rose in his hair and no shawl on a cold September day. After the sermon, in the churchyard, he knelt before Varvara Petrovna:

Asked whether she is Mrs. Lebyadkina, she says no, that her brother is Lebyadkin. Varvara Petrovna takes her home, and she laughs hysterically for the three minutes of the ride. In ch. V, Part One, in the drawing room of Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina, she examines the furniture, the painted ceiling, and the bronze crucifix with pleasure, says merci for the coffee, and asks whether her aunt is angry. She recognizes Shatov and his sister, Darya Pavlovna Shatova, and is amazed that her brother calls such a charming creature a serf. When Stavrogin arrives and tells her, with the gravity of someone convincing a child, that he is a stranger to her, neither husband nor father nor fiancé, she asks whether she may kneel before him. When she steps on her short leg, she falls sideways into the armchair. She leaves the room almost hanging on his arm, ashamed, flushed, and limping.

In ch. II, Part Two, in the captain's new house, she falls asleep sitting on the sofa and wakes to find Stavrogin's fixed gaze on her, and she weeps like a child. She calls him prince and says she is not fit to be a countess. She fears he will be hurt by some remark about her, and thinks what people will feel for her is more pity than shame. He offers her a life in the distant mountains of Switzerland, without touching her, and she laughs: forty years there is absurd, and a falcon cannot turn into an owl. She asks why he calls him prince, hears that he was never a prince, and then declares him an impostor, asks whether he killed the real one, and tells him how she unmasked him:

Joseph Frank takes her to be the one who truly unmasks him, by calling him Grishka Otrepyev, the historical impostor who passed himself off as tsar.

She accuses him of having a knife in his pocket. He pushes her against the sofa and runs. She chases him, limping, until the captain holds her back on the porch, from where she shouts, laughing and shrieking, the name of the false Dmitry, anathema. In ch. II, Part Three, on the night of the ball, Shatov goes to see her and finds her well, and the captain dead drunk on a sofa. In ch. III, Part Three, the new house, isolated, fifty paces from the others, catches fire before the rest and does not burn away completely, because its owner saves it with the neighbors. Inside are the captain with his throat cut, the maid with her head smashed in, and she, stabbed many times, fallen by the door. Whoever killed them knew where the money was, and her trunk and the silver lining of the icon were not touched.

Themes Embodied

Marya Timofeyevna is Truth and Lies spoken by someone the world does not take seriously. The town takes her for mad, her brother treats her like an animal, Pyotr describes her as the whim of a tired man, and it is she who says of Stavrogin what no one in the room says. What links her to God and the Divine is not doctrine but a way of praying with the body: she kisses the ground, weeps for no cause, and believes that tears run on their own and are not bad (ch. IV, Part One). And what links her to Guilt is the fear, held for five years, of having offended her husband without knowing how (ch. II, Part Two).

What makes her so hard to read is that she mixes registers. In the same conversation she says God and nature, the convent, the son in the lake, the Mother of God as damp earth, and the man she does not know (ch. IV, Part One). And the novel has her say, five years into the marriage, what no one else dares: that the man who supports her in the room was ashamed of her. She is the woman to whom Stavrogin binds himself out of boredom and out of a wish to degrade his life, and she is the one who unmasks him when he tries to treat her tenderly.

Divergent Readings

The text does not decide between the holy madwoman and the wounded woman. When she speaks of the Mother of God and of tears, sometimes someone appears who has gone through grief and finds joy, and sometimes someone who does not know where prophecy ends and delirium begins (ch. IV, Part One). When she speaks of the son, the chronicler does not know whether there was a real birth and a husband she hides, or a delirium in which the pain is the proof. Shatov insists, she answers that the question is hard, and she weeps just the same (ch. IV, Part One). When she asks only to kiss a hand in the churchyard, the scene has two readings: a naive request from someone who says what she feels, or the gesture of someone who knows who Varvara Petrovna is and what moves her (ch. IV, Part One). And when she accuses Stavrogin of being an impostor, the text joins a delirium, since there is no throne, to an exact diagnosis, the shame, without separating the two (ch. II, Part Two).

Marya Timofeyevna and Liza each put to Stavrogin, in their own way, the question the novel does not answer. One tells him he is an impostor, the other asks him to say whether he is guilty, and both die in his wake. Pyotr swears he did not order the Lebyadkins killed and blames Fedka and the money the captain was showing. Stavrogin tells Liza that he knew and did not stop it (ch. III, Part Three).

Relationships

• Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin: the secret husband, who treats her like a marquise, who tells her she is a stranger, and whom she calls an impostor (ch. V, Part One, ch. II, Part Two).
• Ignat Lebyadkin: the brother who beats her, collects a fee from her seducer, and dies with her (ch. IV, Part One, ch. V, Part One, ch. III, Part Three).
• Ivan Shatov: the neighbor who visits her in secret and whose hair she combs, and to whom she says she will not tell her secret even if they kill her (ch. IV, Part One).
• Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina: the benefactress whose hand she only wanted to kiss, and who is frightened to see her limp (ch. IV, Part One).
• Lizaveta Nikolaevna Tushina: the young woman who insists on seeing her and follows her with her eyes to the door (ch. IV, Part One, ch. V, Part One).
• Darya Pavlovna Shatova: the ward her brother calls a serf girl, and whose beauty she admires (ch. V, Part One).
• Fedka: the runaway servant to whom Stavrogin tosses money after the scene with her (ch. II, Part Two), and to whom Pyotr attributes her death (ch. III, Part Three).
• Alexei Kirillov: a witness at her wedding and the one who tore the nagaika away (ch. III, Part One, ch. I, Part Two).