Nekhludoff and his aunts

Nekhludoff's aunts, Sophia Ivanovna and Maria Ivanovna, are the maiden ladies on whose dairy farm Katusha Maslova's mother worked and where Katusha herself was raised after her mother's death. The two sisters embody contrasting approaches to the girl: Sophia Ivanovna, the kinder and more sentimental of the two, stood godmother to Katusha, dressed her in nice clothes, and taught her to read and write, intending to educate her like a young lady. Maria Ivanovna, the harder sister, believed the child should be brought up to work and trained her to be a good servant, exacting punishment and even striking her when in a bad temper. Growing up under these two different influences, Katusha turned out "half servant, half young lady." The aunts called her "the saved one" after Sophia Ivanovna's intervention saved her from the neglect that had killed her five older siblings.

Summer Refuge and Moral Formation

During the summer of his third year at university, Nekhludoff stayed with his aunts to write an essay on land tenure. Their secluded estate provided a quiet, distraction-free environment where he could immerse himself in the ideas of Herbert Spencer and Henry George, and he resolved to give up to the peasant labourers the land he had inherited from his father. The aunts loved their nephew and heir very tenderly, and he was fond of them and their simple, old-fashioned life. It was during this stay that he first met Katusha, then a black-eyed, quick-footed girl of sixteen, and fell into a pure, chaste love with her—a love that his aunts noticed with alarm. Sophia Ivanovna feared that Dmitri, with his thoroughgoing, resolute character, might make up his mind to marry her without considering her birth or station, while Maria Ivanovna worried about a more sordid intimacy. They wrote to Nekhludoff's mother about their fears, but never mentioned them to him directly.

The Second Visit and Betrayal

Three years later, now a depraved and selfish officer, Nekhludoff returned to his aunts on his way to join his regiment. The aunts welcomed him more warmly than ever, touched that he was going to war where he might be wounded or killed. He had intended to stay only a day and night, but after seeing Katusha he agreed to stay over Easter and telegraphed his friend Schonbock to meet him there instead. During this visit, the animal man in Nekhludoff triumphed over the spiritual, and he seduced and abandoned Katusha, giving her a 100-rouble note. The aunts, pious old ladies, turned Katusha out when they noticed she was pregnant, and later told Nekhludoff that she had "gone wrong," attributing it to her mother's depraved nature—a judgment he was pleased to hear because it seemed to acquit him.

Aftermath and Memory

Years later, when Nekhludoff visits Panovo, the estate he inherited from his aunts, he is struck by the decay and dilapidation of the buildings, but the garden has grown and is in full bloom. The lilac bushes that formed the hedge are in full flower, as they had been when, fourteen years earlier, he played gorelki with the fifteen-year-old Katusha and fell into the nettles behind one of them. The larch that Sophia Ivanovna had planted near the house has grown into a tree whose trunk would make a beam. The memories of that happy summer—the women's wooden bats slapping wet clothes, the rhythmical sound of the mill, the spring breeze blowing about his hair—return to him with painful vividness, and he feels himself as he had been then, with the same freshness and purity, and at the same time knows that all this can be no more. He finds an old photograph of the group—his aunts, a student, and Katusha—and takes it with him, later giving it to Maslova in prison. The aunts' house and all its contents he leaves to the miller, to be taken down and carried away at one-tenth of the real value, completing the dissolution of that world.