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Mashenka (Marya Semyonovna)
Mashenka
also: Машенька, Марья Семеновна, Marya Semyonovna
Vasya's young wife, seduced by their neighbor Matvei Savvich while her husband was away in the army; after Vasya's return she is savagely beaten by him, and when he dies soon afterward is tried and convicted of poisoning him with arsenic, sentenced to thirteen years' hard labor in Siberia, and dies of fever in a provincial jail before reaching exile.
Reading notes
- Peasant Women §25 poisoning death and trial
This section and the one following recount, in the narrator's own summarizing words, the discovery of arsenic in Vasya's body, his exhumation, and Mashenka's arrest and trial; the narrative leaves genuinely ambiguous, as Matvei Savvich himself notes, whether Mashenka poisoned her husband or whether Vasya -- devastated by the beating and his own guilt -- poisoned himself. The story never resolves this ambiguity; the reader is left, like the fictional court, without certainty, while Matvei Savvich (who set the whole chain of events in motion by seducing Mashenka) casts himself throughout as blameless.
- Peasant Women §25 exile her to hard labor in Siberia for thirteen years
Penal servitude ("каторга") in Siberia was the standard sentence under the Russian Empire's criminal code for a conviction of spousal murder by poisoning; Mashenka's sentence and subsequent death from fever in a provincial jail before she ever reaches the Siberian katorga reflects the well-documented reality that many convicts died of disease during transport or in overcrowded transit prisons, a subject Chekhov had studied firsthand on his 1890 journey to the Sakhalin penal colony.