person
Katya
also: Катя, Катей, сестра Катя
Klimov's eighteen-year-old sister, preparing for her teacher's examination when he returns home ill; she nurses him and, unknown to him during his delirium and early convalescence, contracts typhus from him and dies, buried three days before he learns of it.
Reading notes
- Typhus §39 she bowed to the icon
The household icon corner (красный угол) was the customary focus of private prayer in a Russian home; Katya's shadow bowing to it, doubled by her shadow bowing on the wall so that "two shadows prayed to God," is one of the story's most striking images of the delirium -- and, retrospectively, of dramatic irony, since it is Katya herself, not Klimov, who does not survive what she is here praying over.
- Typhus §58 "She caught the typhus from you, and... and died."
The story's turn: Katya, who nursed her feverish brother, contracted the same infectious disease from him and died while he was too delirious to know it, buried before he even regained consciousness enough to ask after her. Chekhov gives the death no scene of its own -- it happens entirely offstage, delivered in the aunt's few broken words -- concentrating the story's grief on its aftermath in Klimov's convalescing body rather than on the death itself.