person
Mishenka
also: Мишенька, Миша, Misha, Mashenkin Mishenka
Anna Akimovna's footman, a sedate, pious, fastidious young man with a thin velvety mustache who walks with the deliberate grace of someone learning a quadrille figure. He reveres the rich and well-born and despises paupers and petitioners; the red-haired maid Masha has loved him hopelessly for three years, and Anna Akimovna repeatedly urges him to marry her, offering a dowry, but he considers Masha too tempting for marriage (fit, in his view, only for misconduct) and grows disgusted with her after seeing a poor student embrace her. Late that night he mocks Pimenov behind Anna Akimovna's back, imagining him helpless and ridiculous at a table with Lysevich and Krylin -- the remark that finally punctures her daydream about marrying Pimenov.
Reading notes
- A Woman's Kingdom §113 God marks the rogue
Бог шельму метит ("God marks the rogue/scoundrel") -- a Russian proverb ordinarily meaning that a wicked person will eventually be exposed or punished by some visible sign. Mishenka inverts its usual sense, using it (and the following "deep calls unto deep") to argue instead that visible worldly success -- riches -- is itself proof of a person's inner decency, and poverty proof of vice; Anna Akimovna's flat dismissal of his reasoning as "tiresome and incomprehensible" registers the story's own distance from his self-serving theology.