"Zhidovka" (жидовка) -- ethnic slur

Reading notes

• Ivanov §120 With a Jewish accent

  Count Shabelsky, mimicking Anna Petrovna's laughter, breaks into a mock Yiddish-inflected Russian accent ("Зачиво вы шмеетесь?", rendered here as "Vhat for is you laughing?") -- an unprompted, casually cruel impression of his own nephew's dying wife's origins, played for a laugh she herself, moments later, half-joins. It is immediately followed (\S121-122) by his repeating to her face the antisemitic proverb he had used at dinner (see the note at \S122). See the headnote's sensitivity-flags section for the fuller discussion of this scene's function.

• Ivanov §195 With a Jewish accent

  Anna Petrovna herself, mid-conversation with Dr. Lvov about her own approaching death, suddenly breaks into a mock Yiddish-accented aside ("Жвините, пожалуста!", rendered here as "Ekshcuse me, pleashe!") -- performing, on herself, the same register of mockery that Shabelsky performs on her at \S120, and that others (Zinaida Savishna, Kosykh) direct at her behind her back. It is one of the play's most quietly devastating details: a woman who has been disowned by her own family for marrying outside her faith, dying in a household that casually mocks the very origin she gave everything up for, momentarily turning that mockery on herself, perhaps as a bitter joke, perhaps as a genuinely internalized reflex. See the headnote's sensitivity-flags section.

• Ivanov §296 that Jewess of his

  Renders "жидовка," the feminine form of the ethnic slur "жид" (zhid), used by Zinaida Savishna in gossip about Anna Petrovna -- who is present nowhere in this scene to hear it. Zinaida Savishna's complaint is entirely mercenary (she resents that Anna Petrovna's disownment by her own family means Ivanov never received the dowry money Zinaida Savishna had counted on), and the slur is delivered with the same flat, unremarked casualness as the rest of her gossip. See the note at \S304 for its recurrence two lines later, and the headnote's sensitivity-flags section for the fuller pattern this belongs to.

• Ivanov §304 he and his Jewess

  A second instance of "жидовка" (see the note at \S296), two lines later in the same speech, confirming this is Zinaida Savishna's habitual way of referring to Anna Petrovna rather than a one-off slip.

• Ivanov §713 you Jewess

  The play's single most freighted use of this slur: Ivanov, in the climactic Act Three confrontation with his dying wife, shouts "Замолчи, жидовка!" ("Be quiet, you Jewess!") at Anna Petrovna herself -- the same slur used earlier in careless gossip by Zinaida Savishna (\S296, \S304) and in Shabelsky's joking impression and proverb (\S120, \S122), now weaponized directly by her own husband against her, in the most intimate and cruel possible register. Sections 717-720 immediately follow, in which Ivanov, having lost control, tells her outright that she is dying -- a second, separate cruelty he immediately recognizes and is horrified by ("How guilty I am!"). See the headnote's sensitivity-flags section for the full discussion of this scene and its dramatic function.

• Ivanov §747 latched onto the Jewess

  Kosykh's gossiping aside about Ivanov ("На жидовке нарвался," here "He latched onto the Jewess") -- another instance of Anna Petrovna being reduced to her ethnicity by a minor character discussing Ivanov's finances behind his back, structurally identical in function to Zinaida Savishna's earlier gossip (\S296, \S304).

• Ivanov §792 the little Jewess

  Renders "жидовочку," the diminutive form of the same slur (see the notes at \S296, \S713); Count Shabelsky uses it here in Act Four, over a year after Anna Petrovna's death, glancing at a cello that recalls her to him -- the diminutive form registering, ambiguously, as something closer to rueful affection than to the earlier instances' casual contempt, but still the same word.

• The Mire §36 that mangy Yid woman

  Renders the Russian ethnic slur "жидовка" (zhidovka), the derogatory feminine form of "zhid," here intensified with "pарxатая" ("mangy"/"scabby"). Current and unremarkable in period Russian speech, and put here into the lieutenant's projected mouth by Susanna herself, imagining how he will describe her after the wedding. Preserved untranslated-in-spirit and unsoftened per the corpus's sensitivity policy -- see the headnote's dedicated sensitivity-flag section.