Simeon Kartinkin

Simeon Kartinkin is a minor but structurally essential figure in the trial that drives the plot of Resurrection. A peasant from the village of Borki in the Toula Government, he worked as a waiter at the Hotel Mauritania. His role in the poisoning of the merchant Smelkoff and his subsequent contradictory testimony expose the mechanisms by which the legal system manufactures guilt from the confusion and fear of the powerless. His sentence—eight years of penal servitude in Siberia—is the heaviest handed down in the case, and his fate, alongside Maslova's, illustrates the novel's central indictment of a society that punishes its victims.

Identity and Background

Kartinkin is introduced as a red-haired, freckled man, dressed in a prison cloak too long and wide for him, who holds his arms close to his sides to keep the sleeves from slipping over his hands. When questioned, he speaks rapidly in a cracked voice, his lips moving nervously and inaudibly even when he is not answering. He is thirty-three years old, of the Orthodox faith, unmarried, and a peasant from the village of Borki in the Krapivinskia district of the Toula Government. He states that he has never been tried before. His occupation is given as a waiter at the Hotel Mauritania, where he worked alongside Euphemia Botchkova.

Role in the Crime and Trial

Kartinkin's involvement in the events of 17 January 188- is established through the indictment and his own shifting testimony. According to the prosecution, he and Botchkova were present when Maslova, using a key given her by Smelkoff, opened the merchant's portmanteau and took out money. The indictment further alleges that Kartinkin supplied Maslova with a white powder—arsenic—which she dissolved in brandy and gave to Smelkoff, causing his death. When first examined, Kartinkin confessed that he and Botchkova, at Maslova's instigation, had stolen the money and divided it among themselves, and that he had supplied the powders to make Smelkoff sleep. However, when examined a second time, he denied everything, accusing Maslova of acting alone. During the trial itself, he pleads not guilty, insisting that his business was only to attend to the lodgers. The president of the court repeatedly cuts off his rambling, incoherent answers, and the usher has to physically intervene to make him sit down. Throughout the proceedings, Kartinkin never stops moving the muscles of his cheeks, as if whispering something, a tic that marks him as a man caught in a system he cannot comprehend.

Sentence and Aftermath

The jury finds Kartinkin guilty of both the theft and the poisoning. The court sentences him to be deprived of all property rights and to eight years of penal servitude in Siberia, with the consequences stated in the penal code. When the sentence is read, he stands holding his arms close to his sides and moving his lips, a posture of mute, mechanical submission. His fate is sealed by the same judicial machinery that condemns Maslova, and his presence in the gang of prisoners that Nekhludoff later accompanies to Siberia serves as a constant reminder of the arbitrary cruelty of the law. Unlike Maslova, whose sentence is eventually commuted, Kartinkin receives no reprieve; his eight-year term stands as the full weight of the state's punishment for a crime in which his actual degree of guilt remains murky.

Thematic Significance

Kartinkin embodies the novel's critique of a legal system that processes the poor and the inarticulate as if they were interchangeable parts. His inability to tell a coherent story, his rapid shifts between confession and denial, and his physical tics all mark him as a man broken by the very conditions—poverty, ignorance, fear—that the system claims to correct. He is not a calculating criminal but a bewildered peasant caught in a web of circumstance and manipulation. His conviction, alongside Maslova's, demonstrates that the law does not seek truth but rather produces a verdict that satisfies the procedural needs of the court. In the end, Kartinkin is less a character than a symptom: a living proof that the justice system, as Tolstoy portrays it, is designed to crush the weak rather than to protect them.