Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

It was clean everywhere, it was quiet and empty everywhere, icon lamps shone before the icons, and nowhere in the house was there a living sound, a human voice.

For one thing, exceeding boredom in the merchant’s locked-up tower… had more than once filled the merchant’s young wife with pining, to the point of stupefaction.

I reckoned a man could carry you around in his arms the whole day and not get tired out, but only feel the pleasure it gave him.

Our strength, it’s our strength gives us weight—not the body!

In that house, a wife was nothing more than a slave or a decoration.

Chapter One

Characters sometimes emerge in our parts that, no matter how many years pass since encountering them, you never recall certain ones without an emotional tremor. To the number of such characters belongs the merchant’s wife, Katerina Lvovna Izmailova, who once played out a terrible drama, after which our local nobility, following someone’s light remark, began to call her Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.

Katerina Lvovna was not born a beauty, but she was a very pleasant-looking woman. She was only in her twenty-fourth year; she was short, but slender, her neck carved as if from marble, her shoulders rounded, her chest firm, her nose straight and delicate, her eyes black and lively, her forehead white and high, and her hair black, black to the point of being blue-black. She was married off to our merchant Izmailov from Tuskari in the Kursk province, not for love or any inclination, but simply because Izmailov sought her hand, and she was a poor girl who couldn’t be choosy about suitors. The Izmailov house in our town was not insignificant: they traded in fine flour, rented a large mill in the district, owned a profitable orchard outside the town, and had a good house in town. Overall, they were wealthy merchants. Moreover, their family was quite small: the father-in-law, Boris Timofeyich Izmailov, a man close to eighty, long widowed; his son, Zinovy Borisych, Katerina Lvovna’s husband, a man also over fifty, and Katerina Lvovna herself—and that was all. Katerina Lvovna had no children in the five years since she married Zinovy Borisych. Zinovy Borisych also had no children from his first wife, with whom he lived for twenty years before being widowed and marrying Katerina Lvovna. He hoped and prayed that God would grant him an heir to the merchant name and capital, even from this second marriage; but again, he was not fortunate with Katerina Lvovna in this regard either.

This childlessness greatly saddened Zinovy Borisych, and not just Zinovy Borisych, but old Boris Timofeyich, and even Katerina Lvovna herself was very much troubled by it. For one, the unbearable boredom in the locked merchant mansion, with its high fence and chained guard dogs, often brought on a melancholy in the young merchant’s wife that drove her nearly mad, and God knows how happy she would have been to nurse a little child; and for another, she was tired of the reproaches: “Why did you marry and for what reason; why did you tie up a man’s fate, you barren woman,” as if she had truly committed some crime against her husband, her father-in-law, and their entire honorable merchant lineage.

Despite all the comfort and wealth, Katerina Lvovna’s life in her father-in-law’s house was utterly tedious. She rarely went visiting, and even when she did go out with her husband on merchant business, it was no pleasure either. The people were all strict: they watched how she sat, how she walked, how she got up; but Katerina Lvovna had a passionate nature, and while living in poverty as a girl, she was accustomed to simplicity and freedom: to run to the river with buckets and bathe in her shift near the landing, or to shower a passing young fellow with sunflower husks through the gate; but here everything was different. The father-in-law and husband would get up very early, drink tea at six in the morning, and go about their business, while she wandered alone from room to room. Everywhere was clean, everywhere was quiet and empty, lamps shone before the icons, but nowhere in the house was there a living sound, a human voice.

Katerina Lvovna would walk around the empty rooms for a while, start yawning from boredom, and climb the small staircase to her marital bedroom, which was arranged in a high, small mezzanine. There she would also sit for a while, stare at how hemp was being hung up near the barns or how fine flour was being poured in—then she would yawn again, and she was glad: she would doze for an hour or two, and when she woke up—it was the same Russian boredom again, the boredom of a merchant house, from which, they say, it is even joyful to hang oneself. Katerina Lvovna was not fond of reading, and besides, there were no books in their house except the Kyiv Paterikon. Katerina Lvovna lived a tedious life in her rich father-in-law’s house for five full years of her marriage to her unkind husband; but, as is customary, no one paid the slightest attention to her boredom.