figure
Marya
also: Марья
Fyodor the cobbler's first wife, asleep on the stove as the story opens; described as good, kind, and hardworking but uneducated and heavy-handed -- Fyodor recalls that her hand "struck painfully," a domestic-violence detail rendered factually and without sensationalism.
Reading notes
- The Cobbler and the Devil §19 her hand was heavy and struck painfully
Presented factually: Fyodor recalls his first wife Marya as good-natured but capable of striking him, one of several period-typical, unsentimentalized details in the story's portrait of a poor cobbler's marriage. The detail sets up a pointed later reversal, where the newly wealthy Fyodor himself moves to strike his new wife (loc 51) -- a role-reversal Chekhov leaves uncommented, neither condemning nor endorsing either instance, in keeping with the story's flat comic-folk register.