Dr. Anger–Adèle Skolyk relationship

Dr. Anger’s relationship with Adèle Skolyk is both tender and governing: he treats her as a daughter to protect, fears the bodily crises he cannot explain, and leaves behind a model of care that Adèle recasts as a right to train and direct the household servant, Stefania. Their bond is clearest not in a single declaration but in its afterlife—in Adèle’s memories of his fear, in her account of his defense of Stefania, and in the labor she says he began shaping from Stefania’s infancy.

A Father’s Fear and Protection

Adèle remembers her father as deeply afraid of her illness. When she was overcome by convulsions, her mother stayed beside her and held her head to keep her tongue from slipping into her throat. Dr. Anger, by contrast, would turn pale and leave the house. His withdrawal did not mean indifference: he spent the night reading the psalter over Adèle, believing that someone had entered her. His response held terror and devotion together, as though prayer could guard against a danger for which he had no medical explanation.

That fear also informed his decision to marry Adèle to Josef. In Adèle’s account, Dr. Anger hoped the marriage would calm the demon he imagined was afflicting her. She says he trusted Josef despite the young man’s lack of a beard, a feature Dr. Anger ordinarily considered a sign of respectability. The wedding furnishings—Hutsul furniture, tiles, and dishes—belong to the same account of a father arranging his daughter’s future in the hope of securing her safety and an orderly domestic life. Adèle’s recollection complicates any simple picture of paternal authority: his concern was real, but its terms were shaped by fear and by a supernatural explanation of her seizures.

Care in a Household of Work

The intimacy of the family is also expressed through practical care, though much of that care is performed by Stefania. When Adèle is unwell, Stefania changes the wet pillowcase, makes cold cucumber-juice compresses for her swollen face, and prepares nourishing food despite Adèle’s protests. She also massages Adèle and tends to her anemia, tasks that sit alongside cooking, cleaning, shopping, and carrying meals to Petro at the cathedral or prison chapel. The household’s affection is therefore inseparable from labor: Dr. Anger’s family life depends on a servant’s daily work, even as that work is framed as closeness and belonging.

After the doctor’s death, Stefania imagines Adèle as unable to survive without her. She fears Adèle might injure herself while attempting ordinary tasks, start a fire, scald herself, or cut her hand with an axe. This is Stefania’s anxious conviction, not an objective account of Adèle’s capacities, but it shows how the father-daughter household’s dependence continues after Dr. Anger is gone. His care for Adèle is remembered within a structure in which Stefania feels responsible for keeping her safe—and feels unable to leave.

The Defense of Stefania and Adèle’s Retelling

The doctor’s protection of Stefania becomes a particularly charged part of the family’s history. When Mademoiselle Zuza proposed buying Stefania from him, Dr. Anger erupted in anger at the idea of selling a living person. According to Adèle’s later telling, he said he would not give up his dog, much less Stefania: he had saved her from the fire, raised her from early childhood, and regarded her as inseparable from the family, as precious as the gold watch he had inherited from his father. His refusal establishes a genuine act of protection, but the comparison also places Stefania within the household’s intimate world through a language of possession and inherited value.

Stefania receives Adèle’s account as proof of love. She is overwhelmed by the story that Dr. Anger defended her, grew furious, and would not part with her; she takes the gold watch comparison as evidence that she was among the most precious things he owned. Adèle then supplies a different interpretation. In a wise, elderly tone, she explains that separating from Stefania would have been unreasonable because the family had invested so much effort in educating her; replacing her would mean training another servant. Adèle’s explanation diminishes the emotional meaning Stefania finds in the story, while Stefania suspects that Adèle is jealous and trying to make her father’s anger seem ordinary. The doctor’s defense is thus preserved through competing readings: love and protection for Stefania, prudent household management in Adèle’s version.

Inheritance: Training, Service, and Belonging

Adèle openly presents the relationship between family and servant as a form of education. Speaking to Ernest Thorn, she says that servants cannot simply be acquired by luck: they must be educated, raised, and instructed, in a process close to training. She insists that such training succeeds only when joined to humane behavior, friendly understanding, and closeness. Her father, she says, began this work with Stefania from the cradle, and Adèle continued it in an atmosphere she describes as tender and affectionate. The warmth of that account does not dissolve its hierarchy. Adèle calls the work an art of preserving a fragile boundary: a servant must not become lax, and a mistress who is too kind risks having a troublesome servant who complains or refuses the work expected of her.

That inheritance shapes Adèle’s continuing attachment to Stefania. When Stefania now works in two houses, keeping both clean and orderly and cooking in both, Adèle jokes that she would not survive if Stefania left. The remark echoes the household’s dependence while also making departure emotionally difficult. Later, at Adèle’s birthday gathering, Stefania describes the servant’s position from within: the guests eat and praise the food, while she must prepare, cook, bake, wash, clean, and mend, clenching her teeth and remaining silent. Petro helps carry the dishes and tells her that she is family and that their home would not be what it is without her. His gratitude offers recognition, but it does not erase the work’s unequal distribution or Stefania’s sense that she must serve without speaking.

What the Relationship Leaves Behind

Dr. Anger’s bond with Adèle survives as a mixture of memory, fear, and domestic practice. His prayers over her during convulsions reveal a father trying to protect his daughter from a threat he imagined as spiritual; his arrangement of her marriage shows how that fear entered decisions about her future. His defense of Stefania gives the servant a powerful story of being cherished, but Adèle’s retelling turns the same episode toward the practical value of keeping a trained worker. And her account of her father’s lifelong instruction of Stefania makes affection itself part of a system of service.

The relationship’s lasting significance lies in this unresolved overlap. Care is not absent: the doctor fears for Adèle, and his refusal to sell Stefania protects her from being treated as a commodity. Yet care coexists with hierarchy and dependence. Adèle inherits both her father’s intimacy with Stefania and his authority over the household’s arrangements, while Stefania experiences belonging as inseparable from labor and an obligation she cannot easily abandon.