figure
Natasha
also: Наташа
The examining magistrate's late wife, recounted at first as a stranger's story: a healthy young woman who insisted for months she would die immediately after giving birth, and did, half an hour after the birth -- a death the doctor's questioning reveals she likely caused herself, after catching her husband with another woman, in "The Examining Magistrate" (1887).
Reading notes
- The Examining Magistrate §30 She poisoned herself, in all likelihood
This is the story's turning point: the doctor's offhand clinical guess reframes everything the magistrate has just told as a stranger's anecdote into a specific accusation. Nothing explicit is shown -- the poisoning is inferred entirely from the dialogue that follows (motive, opportunity, and the magistrate's own admission at loc 46 that his wife kept something "of the sort" by her) and from the magistrate's final breakdown, not from any depiction of the act itself.
- The Examining Magistrate §54 Это я рассказывал вам про свою жену, про себя
The magistrate's confession that the story was his own turns the entire preceding dialogue into dramatic irony in retrospect: he has spent the whole carriage ride interrogating a case in which he is both the investigator and, unknowingly to the doctor until this line, the accused.