# Praskóvya Fyódorovna — The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories character guide

> Praskóvya Fyódorovna in The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy.

**Role:** supporting

**Also known as:** Praskovya Fyodorovna Golovin

**First appearance:** 0056-the-death-of-ivan-ilyitch

## Snapshot

Ivan Ilyitch's wife, a woman whose concern for propriety and comfort gradually hardens into something closer to resentment.

## Who they are

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.

## In the story

### [The Death of Ivan Ilyitch](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/leo_tolstoy_short_fiction_se/chapters/the-death-of-ivan-ilyitch)

Her husband's irritability and illness exacerbate marital strife; she feels trapped and resentful, wishing for his death yet dreading the financial loss.

### [The Posthumous Papers of the Hermit, Fedor Kusmich](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/leo_tolstoy_short_fiction_se/chapters/the-posthumous-papers-of-the-hermit-fedor-kusmich)

Implied as Alexander's 'consumptive, narrow-minded, deceitful' wife, who poisoned his life.

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/leo_tolstoy_short_fiction_se/characters/praskovya_fyodorovna
- Book: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/leo_tolstoy_short_fiction_se
- All characters: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/leo_tolstoy_short_fiction_se/characters