person
Zhuzhelitsa (Pasha / Spiridonovna)
Zhuzhelitsa
also: Жужелица, Паша, Pasha, Спиридоновна, Spiridonovna, the Ground Beetle
A pilgrim woman (богомолка) in her fifties, small, thin, sharp-eyed, sharp-nosed, and sharp-chinned, whose real name is Pasha, or Spiridonovna; nicknamed Zhuzhelitsa ("the Ground Beetle") in merchant households for her spitefulness and love of ill-will. She arrives to spend the night at Anna Akimovna's on Christmas evening, sings devoutly before the icons, eats and drinks heartily despite her professed piety, then presides over the evening's game of kings, needling Varvarushka with pointed gossip about hypocritical devout women and urging Anna Akimovna, half in earnest, to take a sham husband for appearances while living and loving as she pleases. It is Zhuzhelitsa who extracts Anna Akimovna's public, half-joking vow to marry Pimenov during the card game.
Reading notes
- A Woman's Kingdom §207 pilgrim woman
Богомолка (bogomolka), a woman who travels between monasteries, shrines, and pious households living on alms and hospitality in exchange for prayers, hymn-singing, and religious talk -- a recognizable social type in provincial and merchant-class Russian life. Zhuzhelitsa's cynical worldliness about who is really pious and who merely performs piety (Sections 215-226) plays directly against this expected role, and against Varvarushka's outward saintliness in particular.
- A Woman's Kingdom §224 off you go, Malashka
Гуляй, Малашка ("off you go, Malashka" / "have your fun, Malashka") -- Malashka being a diminutive folk form of a woman's name (compare Anna Akimovna's own folk-diminutive "Annushka"), used here as an exclamation of devil-may-care abandon; Zhuzhelitsa repeats the phrase, eventually addressing it to herself (Section 226) in a rare moment of open regret at her own past caution, which she urges Anna Akimovna not to repeat.