Praskóvya Fyódorovna

Praskóvya Fyódorovna enters marriage expecting the respectable life her position promises, and finds instead a husband whose illness turns him into a burden she cannot comfortably name. Her pity curdles into irritation as Ivan's suffering disrupts the orderly household she has carefully built, and her visits to his sickroom become exercises in endurance rather than tenderness. She is not cruel so much as human — a woman trapped between duty and the unbearable proximity of death — and her presence sharpens the story's indictment of lives lived without real connection.