Nikolai has a son by Fenichka, a young servant girl with the kind of face men fall in love with, at least in this book. "That pure, sweet, timorously upturned face haunted him."
The other day I listened to a radio program about L'inconnue, a woman who, according to legend, drowned herself in the Seine, and whose death mask became extraordinarily popular, hung in artists' homes, written about in stories, and even used for the CPR dummy, Resusci Anne. The words used to describe her face--saintly, peaceful, innocent--are those used to describe Fenichka. It's not something I entirely understand. I get as far as thinking, "She's like the madonna," but I don't know where to go from there.
There are other female faces to contrast with the innocent, blushing Fenichka's. The woman Uncle Pavel was in loved and lost in his youth:
Her one good feature was her eyes, and not so much the eyes (they were grey, and not large) as their look, which was swift and deep, with an almost devil-may-care defiance, and wistful to the verge of despondency--an enigmatic look.
One who is more like Fenichka, Nikolai's late wife, whom he remembers as a young girl with an "innocent, questioning gaze."
And the modern Yevdoxia, a friend of a friend of the young ones:
She evidently considered herself a good-natured simple creature, and yet, whatever she did, one always had the impression that she was doing the very thing she did not want to do.
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