Lizaveta Smerdyastchaya

Lizaveta Smerdyastchaya is a vulnerable woman living at the margins of the town whose death in childbirth leads Grigory and Marfa to take in her son, Pavel. The account gives her little speech or independent perspective: it presents her through others’ descriptions of her body and circumstances, while making her death the hinge between her precarious life and the household’s adoption of the orphan.

Identity and Circumstances

Lizaveta is described as a dwarfish woman, less than five feet tall, with a broad, healthy, red face, a blank expression, and a fixed stare. The account’s language is filtered through the people around her: after her death, pious old women remember her as not quite five feet tall. Her appearance is observed in terms that stress how strange or unsettling she seems, rather than giving access to her own understanding of herself.

She wanders barefoot in summer and winter, wearing only a hempen smock. Her coarse, nearly black hair curls like lamb’s wool and forms what the narrator describes as a huge cap; it is crusted with mud and leaves. These details convey exposure and deprivation as ordinary conditions of her life. The narrative offers no home, family, or means of support for her, and its description makes her physical vulnerability especially visible.

Death and Pavel’s Birth

In the circumstances surrounding her death, Lizaveta manages to climb a fence despite her condition and leaps down, injuring herself. Grigory sends Marfa to her and goes to fetch a nearby midwife. They save the baby, but Lizaveta dies at dawn.

The brief sequence turns on a sharp division: the child survives, while his mother does not. The narrative records her death without giving her final words or an account of her experience. Her last hours are instead conveyed through the actions of those who reach her and the fact of the birth, leaving her own voice absent from the event that determines her son’s future.

Pavel and the Household

After Lizaveta’s death, Grigory takes the baby home and places him on Marfa’s lap. He calls the child an orphan and a child of God, saying that the household’s own lost child has sent them this one. He also describes the baby as coming from a devil’s son and a holy innocent, joining a judgment about the child’s parentage to a language of compassion and religious kinship.

Marfa raises the boy, who is christened Pavel. Lizaveta’s lasting place in the story is therefore bound to the consequences of her death: the child survives and enters Grigory and Marfa’s household, while she herself remains known chiefly through other people’s descriptions and decisions. The contrast between her social exposure and the care extended to her orphan makes the circumstances of Pavel’s beginning both a family history and a measure of the limits of Lizaveta’s place in it.