person
Lizaveta
also: Лиза, Лизавета, Liza, Lizaveta
Maxim Gorchakov's young wife, newly married and keeping her first Easter; she refuses to let her husband cut into their blessed kulich for a sick Cossack met on the road, and her later unproven claim that the Cossack was merely drunk becomes the flashpoint of the couple's first quarrel.
Reading notes
- The Cossack §58 every drunkard going
Lizaveta's claim that the Cossack was drunk is her own assertion, made in anger and offered with no supporting evidence anywhere else in the story -- the Cossack's own words and the narrator's description (weary, sick eyes; unable to rise without effort; vanished without a trace, presumably having ridden on or collapsed) are consistent with illness, not drink. Chekhov leaves the charge unresolved and unconfirmed, and it is this unproven accusation, not any established fact, that hardens into the couple's first quarrel.