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Varvara
also: Варвара
The gardener's wife, pregnant with her fifth child and due around the feast of Elijah; she speaks to Olga Mikhailovna with the calm authority of experience early on, then takes charge of the folk-custom preparations (unlocking every drawer and casket) during the difficult labor that follows.
Reading notes
- The Name-Day Party §113 already pregnant for the fifth time
Varvara's experience with childbirth -- established here in quiet, unremarked contrast to Olga Mikhailovna's first pregnancy -- sets up the class dynamic of the scene: the servant's practical authority over the mistress in matters of the body, and, much later, over the folk-custom preparations for the difficult labor to come.
- The Name-Day Party §249 alife
Renders Varvara's dialectal mispronunciation of 'будет' ('will be') as 'бундить,' folded here into a nonstandard 'alife' for 'alive' to preserve, in English, the marked lower-class speech the source calls attention to directly ('that was how she pronounced the word'). The repetition of this single distorted word, obsessively, becomes the closest thing to comfort either woman can offer during the labor.