In Russian, кликуша (klikusha), "possessed" (our translation), from кликать, "to shout", is the peasant woman given to fits of hysteria and shrieking, whom the people take for possessed and whom the narrator says suffers from a real illness of the countryside. Fyodor calls his second wife, Sofya Ivanovna, mother of Alyosha, this way, and asks whether the son resembles the possessed woman; in front of the hermitage, Zosima covers the head of one of them with his stole.
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