Resurrection

The story of the prisoner Maslova's life was a very common one.

Maslova's mother was the unmarried daughter of a village woman,

employed on a dairy farm, which belonged to two maiden ladies who

were landowners. This unmarried woman had a baby every year, and,

as often happens among the village people, each one of these

undesired babies, after it had been carefully baptised, was

neglected by its mother, whom it hindered at her work, and left

to starve. Five children had died in this way. They had all been

baptised and then not sufficiently fed, and just left to die.

The sixth baby, whose father was a gipsy tramp, would have shared

the same fate, had it not so happened that one of the maiden

ladies came into the farmyard to scold the dairymaids for sending

up cream that smelt of the cow. The young woman was lying in the

cowshed with a fine, healthy, new-born baby. The old maiden lady

scolded the maids again for allowing the woman (who had just been

confined) to lie in the cowshed, and was about to go away, but

seeing the baby her heart was touched, and she offered to stand

godmother to the little girl, and pity for her little

god-daughter induced her to give milk and a little money to the

mother, so that she should feed the baby; and the little girl

lived. The old ladies spoke of her as "the saved one." When the

child was three years old, her mother fell ill and died, and the

maiden ladies took the child from her old grandmother, to whom

she was nothing but a burden.

The little black-eyed maiden grew to be extremely pretty, and so

full of spirits that the ladies found her very entertaining.

The younger of the ladies, Sophia Ivanovna, who had stood

godmother to the girl, had the kinder heart of the two sisters;

Maria Ivanovna, the elder, was rather hard. Sophia Ivanovna

dressed the little girl in nice clothes, and taught her to read

and write, meaning to educate her like a lady. Maria Ivanovna

thought the child should be brought up to work, and trained her

to be a good servant. She was exacting; she punished, and, when

in a bad temper, even struck the little girl. Growing up under

these two different influences, the girl turned out half servant,

half young lady. They called her Katusha, which sounds less

refined than Katinka, but is not quite so common as Katka. She

used to sew, tidy up the rooms, polish the metal cases of the

icons and do other light work, and sometimes she sat and read to

the ladies.