Stefania Tchornenko

Stefania Tchornenko is the first-person narrator whose life in the Anger household is shaped by a contradiction: she is expected to serve Adèle, yet her attachment to her mistress exceeds any ordinary servant’s duty. Her account moves between practical acts of care and feelings she struggles to contain. Jealousy, shame, and emotional crises complicate that devotion, while her responsibility for Felix and her love for Father Josef gradually force her to confront the limits of the role she has accepted.

Identity and Background

Stefania describes herself as sturdy, dark-complexioned, alert, and robust, contrasting her physical presence with Adèle’s pale, delicate appearance. Her own hair is the feature she considers beautiful: dark and strong, it catches a coppery light in the sun. She knows that Petro admires it, but his artistic eye is drawn above all to Adèle, for whom he has built a mausoleum. This contrast places Stefania close to the household while underscoring that she is not its center of affection or power.

Her narration gives intimate access to the labor that sustains the household. She washes floors and windows, polishes silver, prepares food, and responds to Adèle’s needs. The work is not incidental background: it is the practical means through which Stefania expresses attachment, and the obligation that constrains her choices. She ultimately describes her purpose as making Adèle’s life easier, not enforcing justice for herself.

Service, Jealousy, and Emotional Crises

Stefania’s bond with Adèle resists an easy label. She admits that they are neither friends nor sisters, yet feels that no ordinary word can name the connection that has sewn them together. That intimacy does not prevent resentment. When Stefania imagines that Adèle’s infertility might weaken Petro’s desire for her and restore Stefania some of her own place, she recognizes the wish as a bitter, shameful hope. The specialists who examined Adèle had concluded that she could not have children, despite the family’s stories of earlier pregnancies occurring against expectation. Stefania’s jealousy thus attaches itself to a painful fact, not merely to a passing quarrel.

The household’s repeated disputes have taught her a form of silence. Earlier, she listened to Adèle’s complaints, became angry in return, cried, and asked forgiveness; the conflict could resume in the middle of the night, even after an apparent reconciliation. Stefania recalls particular grievances, including Adèle calling her a slave while playing with other girls and accusing her of stealing Doctor Anger’s watch. She also remembers being expected to deal with fleas in the bedding instead of dressing Adèle before a concert, because Doctor Anger’s poor sleep was feared to endanger a patient during an operation. Now she swallows her bitterness and continues working. That choice preserves her service, but it does not resolve the injury beneath it.

Her feelings can also erupt into episodes that she describes as a loss of command over herself. During one crisis, as Adèle accepts a proposal involving Felix, Stefania says she no longer feels like the mild, dutiful servant she tries to be. She may shout, strike her head against a wall, overturn a dish, or reach for Felix; afterward, fear of having done something irreparable is part of the crisis’s aftermath. The episode makes visible the pressure that her habitual restraint conceals: care, anger, and helplessness are not separate forces in her, and their collision can become frightening.

Felix and the Responsibilities of Care

When Stefania says she must also care for the strange child, Felix, she takes on a responsibility that Adèle refuses to hand over to Father Josef. The child’s fate is debated in public: the priest considers religious institutions that might receive him, while bystanders propose different destinations based on their guesses about his origins. Stefania says she cannot understand what they think is improper about his appearance. Her attention shifts from those classifications to the child himself, whose quiet, unwavering gaze and exhausted condition make him difficult for others to read.

Stefania seeks medical help from Doctor Vodnetsky, who examines Felix and finds him neither deaf nor mute, but weakened by hunger. He also notices something unusual about the boy’s joints and bones. After further examination, he wonders aloud whether the signs might indicate Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, calling the boy special. The account places medical observation beside Stefania’s direct knowledge of Felix’s needs: the diagnosis is tentative, while hunger and exhaustion are immediately apparent to her.

Felix’s habit of slipping into narrow hiding places becomes, for Stefania, more than an oddity. She connects his refuge-seeking with her own tendency to hide from the world and avoid claiming anything for herself. She fears that caring for a child who is regarded as strange, while maintaining a particular attachment to a priest, will expose her to public ridicule. Her anxiety is sharpened by the example of a once-respected aristocratic professor who became an object of mockery. In Stefania’s imagining, the household’s scrutiny and the wider community’s judgment converge: to be seen caring for Felix might mean being seen herself, beyond the protective role of a servant.

Father Josef and the Meaning of Service

Stefania’s attachment to Father Josef develops alongside her responsibilities to Adèle and Felix. At one point she approaches her grandfather with deliberate gentleness and says that Father Josef has asked her to come to him at the chapel. In her account, the priest’s presence can draw her out of the refuges in which she habitually places herself. That attraction becomes difficult to separate from her fear of what the world will make of it, especially because she understands him as a priest and imagines that others will judge her desire as socially presumptuous and morally suspect.

A moment of shared prayer turns the question of service into something larger than domestic obedience. When Father Josef is kneeling in evident distress, Stefania is moved to protect and comfort him. She tells him she knows how to serve only through ordinary work: washing floors and windows, cleaning silver, and preparing food. She doubts that such tasks could count as service to God, but Father Josef answers that love must be expressed through actions and truth, not merely words. He then thanks her for teaching him divine love and says that God speaks through anyone. The exchange gives spiritual meaning to the work Stefania already performs, without removing the tensions or inequalities attached to it.

Stefania recognizes that Father Josef has loved her for a long time and admits that she loves him. The recognition brings joy and calamity together rather than offering a simple resolution. On her way home, she finds herself unable to ride her bicycle, while her perception of the surrounding streets and people seems newly acute. The emotional revelation changes how she experiences the world, but it does not release her from the duties and relationships that have made the revelation so fraught.

Public Exposure, Illusion, and Ending

Stefania’s attachment to Adèle is also tested in public. At a gathering, she stops with a tray of sliced cake and announces to the guests that Adèle is having an affair with Father Josef. She claims to have seen it herself and says she has evidence in their laundry, presenting the allegation as something she could swear to before a court. Petro calls out to her in disbelief, while Adèle responds with an insult. The scene turns private conflict into public accusation: Stefania speaks from inside the household’s intimate knowledge, but her claim also exposes how fragile her position is when she asserts herself before others.

The novel’s final fire brings Stefania’s reflections on love and illusion into focus. As the house and its contents are consumed, she remains conscious enough to see her life with unusual clarity. She compares the magician Ernest Thorn’s performance—fog and candlelight reflected in dark mirrors—to illusion rather than a lie, and concludes that people see what they want to see. The comparison gives shape to her retrospective understanding: what she had taken for settled truth, including her place in the household and the meaning of its attachments, has been filtered through desire and selective vision. The ending does not undo her years of service or resolve every relationship; instead, the fire makes the act of seeing itself the final measure of change.