2. The image of Katerina in the play “The Thunderstorm”

Katerina is a lonely young woman who lacks human participation, sympathy, and love. The need for this draws her to Boris. She sees that outwardly he is not like other residents of the city of Kalinov, and, not being able to recognize his inner essence, considers him a person from another world. In her imagination, Boris seems to be a handsome prince who will take her from the “dark kingdom” to fairy world, existing in her dreams.

In terms of character and interests, Katerina stands out sharply from her environment. The fate of Katerina, unfortunately, is a vivid and typical example of the fate of thousands of Russian women of that time. Katerina is a young woman, the wife of the merchant son Tikhon Kabanov. She recently left her home and moved into her husband’s house, where she lives with her mother-in-law Kabanova, who is the sovereign mistress. Katerina has no rights in the family; she is not even free to dispose of herself. She remembers with warmth and love parents' house, my girlhood life. There she lived freely, surrounded by the affection and care of her mother. The religious upbringing she received in the family developed in her impressionability, daydreaming, belief in the afterlife and retribution for man's sins.

Katerina found herself in completely different conditions in her husband’s house. At every step she felt dependent on her mother-in-law, endured humiliation and insults. From Tikhon she does not meet any support, much less understanding, since he himself is under the power of Kabanikha. Out of her kindness, Katerina is ready to treat Kabanikha as her own mother. "But Katerina's sincere feelings do not meet with support from either Kabanikha or Tikhon.

Life in such an environment changed Katerina’s character. Katerina’s sincerity and truthfulness collide in Kabanikha’s house with lies, hypocrisy, hypocrisy, and rudeness. When love for Boris is born in Katerina, it seems like a crime to her, and she struggles with the feeling that washes over her. Katerina's truthfulness and sincerity make her suffer so much that she finally has to repent to her husband. Katerina's sincerity and truthfulness are incompatible with the life of the “dark kingdom”. All this was the cause of Katerina’s tragedy.

"Katerina's public repentance shows the depth of her suffering, moral greatness, and determination. But after repentance, her situation became unbearable. Her husband does not understand her, Boris is weak-willed and does not come to her aid. The situation has become hopeless - Katerina is dying. It is not Katerina's fault one specific person. Her death is the result of the incompatibility of morality and the way of life in which she was forced to exist. The image of Katerina had great educational significance for Ostrovsky’s contemporaries and for subsequent generations. He called for the fight against all forms of despotism and oppression. human personality. This is an expression of the growing protest of the masses against all types of slavery.

Katerina, sad and cheerful, compliant and obstinate, dreamy, depressed and proud. So different states of mind are explained by the naturalness of every mental movement of this simultaneously restrained and impetuous nature, the strength of which lies in the ability to always be itself. Katerina remained true to herself, that is, she could not change the very essence of her character.

I think that the most important character trait of Katerina is honesty with herself, her husband, and the world around her; it is her unwillingness to live a lie. She does not want and cannot be cunning, pretend, lie, hide. This is confirmed by the scene of Katerina’s confession of treason. It was not the thunderstorm, not the frightening prophecy of the crazy old woman, not the fear of hellfire that prompted the heroine to tell the truth. “My whole heart was exploding! I can’t stand it anymore!” - this is how she began her confession. For her honest and integral nature, the false position in which she found herself is unbearable. Living just to live is not for her. To live means to be yourself. Its most precious value is personal freedom, freedom of the soul.

With such a character, Katerina, after betraying her husband, could not stay in his house, return to a monotonous and dreary life, endure constant reproaches and “moral teachings” from Kabanikha, or lose freedom. But all patience comes to an end. It is difficult for Katerina to be in a place where she is not understood, humiliated and insulted human dignity, ignore her feelings and desires. Before her death, she says: “It’s all the same whether you go home or go to the grave... It’s better in the grave...” It’s not death that she desires, but life that is unbearable.

Katerina is a deeply religious and God-fearing person. Since, according to the Christian religion, suicide is a great sin, by deliberately committing it, she showed not weakness, but strength of character. Her death is a challenge to the “dark power”, the desire to live in the “light kingdom” of love, joy and happiness.

The death of Katerina is the result of a collision of two historical eras. With her death, Katerina protests against despotism and tyranny, her death indicates the approaching end of the “dark kingdom.” The image of Katerina belongs to the best images Russian fiction. Katerina is a new type of people in Russian reality in the 60s of the 19th century.

Textbooks will definitely emphasize the religiosity of Katerina from The Thunderstorm. But is it?

At a certain moment, our literature imagined itself as a spiritual teacher and began to talk about things that were unfamiliar and beyond its control - about religious faith. The apotheosis was M. Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita”. And it all started with Ostrovsky.
Schoolchildren have a question after reading “The Thunderstorm”: how could such a believing, truthful (not some Varvara!) woman commit such a terrible sin (which the same sinner Varvara could not even imagine)? How is the heroine’s religiosity, which textbooks follow the author’s lead, do not question, combined with fornication and suicide?
The fact is that it is not so much Katerina who is mistaken as the author himself.
Let's see how religious the heroine of A.N.'s play is. Ostrovsky "The Thunderstorm".
Katerina remembers her childhood as a time when no one taught her to think about responsibility, about sin, the fight against passions, and repentance. She lived like a bird in the wild.
“This is how I was born, hot! – admits Katerina. “I was only six years old, no more, so I did it!” They offended me with something at home, and it was late in the evening, it was already dark; I ran out to the Volga, got into the boat and pushed it away from the shore. The next morning they already found it, about ten miles away! Please note: not a shadow of remorse! Under the guise of rightness hides elementary selfishness. The heroine tells this with pride, with boasting of her independence, with narcissism. Not a word about what the poor mother experienced, how she suffered, tormented, cried. How, apparently, she spent the whole night on the banks of the Volga, crying and raising her hands to Heaven - there is not a hint about this. Self-admiration in her mind is higher than her mother’s suffering. Let’s say she didn’t realize all this as a child, but now she should regret it, be horrified by her behavior. Alas.
Talking about her prayers, she laments: “What I prayed for then, what I asked for, I don’t know; I don’t need anything, I had enough of everything.” But do they pray to acquire anything? A strange idea of ​​prayer, far from the true one. This could have been written by a person who had no experience of warm and sincere prayer. The heroine does not even have a hint of seeing her sins or regretting them. She tells Varvara her sins, but she herself does not see their danger, looks at them not as a sin, but as a virtue, and admires them. And repentance, as you know, is the beginning of faith.
In the seventh scene, the story about childhood is followed by Katerina’s very important monologue about going to church.
“To death I loved going to church! - Katerina begins her story. “Exactly, it happened that I would enter heaven and not see anyone, and I don’t remember the time, and I don’t hear when the service is over.” Here we see that the author himself has a completely distorted understanding of the church service, perceives it as a kind of aesthetic delight of the soul. But the monks say: to pray to God is to shed blood. There is no harder work for a person than to pray to God. People come to church as if they were going to a hospital for the soul. Repentance is work, not a holiday.
Katerina talks about quite have a prosperous life in her parents' house, and she has nothing to pray for. But shouldn’t we pray for loved ones, parents, compatriots? Aren't people suffering nearby? Any person has already adolescence begins to realize common human suffering and learns to perceive other people's pain as his own, learns responsibility for his neighbors. Let us remember Raskolnikov, who is haunted by the human grief of those around him. Our heroine doesn’t want to know any of this. He remembers his daring act of escaping in a boat, but does not remember the suffering and problems of those around him. Therefore, in the subsequent narration in the play there will not be a word about her preoccupation with her drinking husband, her mother-in-law’s hypocrisy, or Varvara’s deception. Other people's problems do not affect her at all; she has been accustomed to egocentrism since childhood. Her husband is eager to drink, how does his wife react to this? “You, Tisha, come quickly, otherwise mamma will scold you again.” Self-love is manifested here, and not concern for the husband’s morality.
Even in Katerina’s love for Boris, we see, first of all, selfish love for her own passion. Love for neighbors - without Christ - “upon closer examination turns out to be a peculiar form of love for oneself.” Katerina loves very much... herself, her passion, her fantasies, her love. “If you hadn’t come, it seems that I would have come to you myself!” - very accurately noted. Passion seeks a way out, and nothing can stop it. She is “looking for her own.”
How is Katerina different from Raskolnikov? Both he and she are outraged by the current situation. Only Katerina is one of our own, and Raskolnikov is a stranger. It’s much more difficult for him than for Katerina, but all his thoughts are about others. This is a Christian approach. Katerina has nothing even close to this, because... This is not clear to the author himself, not even close.
There is a well-known warning among actors: “You must love not yourself in the theater, but the theater in yourself.” So Katerina loves not God and the Church in herself, but herself in the church. She feels good in this beautiful, calm, quiet place. It’s good to dream about something (passionate, pleasant), to enjoy the feeling of your beauty, youth, prosperity, life... Even Dobrolyubov is forced to admit: “It’s not rituals that occupy her in church, she doesn’t hear at all what they sing or read there; she has different music in her soul, different visions...”
The fact that the cause of the tragedy will be her inner sense of self, and not the people around her, was noted by M.M. Dostoevsky: “With some kind of voluptuousness, with some kind of daring, she is already thinking about the minute when everyone will learn about her fall, and dreams of the sweetness of being publicly executed for her act. After this, what kind of despotism could have an influence on such a nature? If she were surrounded by the most kind people, having committed her sin, she would have been executed in the same way and would have grieved." The reason is in the anti-Christian mood of the soul, and not in external despotism. The path to tragedy began in a boat on the Volga, and the world of the Kabanovs is not the reason.
“And I see that it used to be like angels...flying and singing,” continues Katerina. But a person who does not see his sinfulness, who has not cleansed his soul from the dirt of sins to perceive angelic purity, cannot see angels. And even more precisely, he sees not angels, but spirits of darkness, according to the word of God: “...Satan himself disguises himself as an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14). This state is called the state of delusion, when a person, out of pride, considers himself worthy of lofty things, even the vision of Higher powers. A very dangerous condition, from which it is not easy to get out. Katerina is clearly in this state of delight. Hence the answer to the question why she so quickly moves in her thoughts from the “trees of paradise” to thoughts about her lover: “I don’t dream, Varya, as before, of paradise trees and mountains, but as if someone is hugging me so warmly and leading me somewhere, and I follow him, I go...” Here are the “angels” for you...
“Deception” is a state of false spiritual self-awareness, in which the action of one’s own passions (primarily vanity) is perceived by a person as Divine grace or as holiness. It’s one thing to lie and know that you’re lying, so to hide evil, to be cunning, to deceive, as Varvara does. And it’s a completely different matter to consider yourself not a liar, but to believe that you are the right way, people around you just don’t understand you. Katerina sincerely believes that angels fly to her.
“And sometimes I’ll get up at night... and pray until the morning... And I myself don’t know what I’m praying for.” A person who, in addition to the usual prayer rule, he also sincerely prays at night, he won’t be able to cheat on his husband! This is out of the question. In most cases, such a believer is even ready to endure beatings from her husband with humility, let alone cheat on him. And again the temptation comes from the author himself. He writes with confidence about his heroine’s prayer, as if he knows from experience what it is. And after him, teachers, textbooks, and students believe that the heroine really prays to God. But this is all a distorted view of a person from the outside who has no idea about the true essence of the object that he undertook to depict.
Ostrovsky shows the heroine almost as a nun. How did she live in her parents' house? Church, services, pilgrims, spiritual poems, lives, stories about pilgrimage, “stories and singing in the evening,” handicrafts, flowers... The monastery and that’s all! Therefore, these pages of Ostrovsky’s play tempt and mislead everyone: both teachers, and even more so students, are firmly convinced that Katerina really was a religious person, she prayed a lot, and had the fear of God. But the process of prayer itself does not mean actually turning to God. The external side of any religious ritual is easy to repeat and learn. But this will not mean faith itself. “Not everyone who says to Me: “Lord! Lord!” will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in Heaven” (M. 7:21). This is the dangerous temptation of Ostrovsky’s play, where the external is passed off as true, “speaking” as “performing.” Therefore, we must stop talking about Katerina’s religiosity a long time ago.
Katerina completely repeats the words from the parable of the prodigal son. “I am a sinner before God and before you!” (4:6). In the Gospel “I have sinned against heaven and before you...” (Luke 15:21). But Ostrovsky has no further words. The Prodigal Son further thinks like this: “...and is no longer worthy to be called your son; take me as one of your hired servants” (Luke 15:19). That is, Katerina should have said the following after admitting guilt: “... and I am unworthy to be called your wife, for I sinned by adultery. Accept me at least as one of your servants...” Katerina does not think like that and cannot. Once again there is only form without content, which is very dangerous for readers.
“You can be a believer, but not a religious person,” said Patriarch Kirill. - A believer is one who recognizes the existence of God (the majority of these are now, including in our country). These people believe in some higher power, but do not think much about God. Religion is a connection between a person and God, which arises if a person not only recognizes the existence of God, but also if he has established a living connection with the Creator and feels God’s presence in his life; if he, like the Old Testament prophets, walks before the eyes of God, trusting Him with his thoughts, deeds, feelings... When a person daily submits his past day, his innermost thoughts to the judgment of God - sometimes the most nasty, disgusting and destructive... Then we walk before His eyes, and our prayer comes from the heart.” Katerina did not know such a prayer, she did not have such religiosity, she did not show sincere repentance. And “the unrepentant sinner is the new crucifier of Christ” (from the sermons of Archbishop Georgy Koninsky).
Now the apparent contradiction of the play becomes clear and explainable to us, when the heroine so easily moves from prayer to mortal sins - adultery and suicide. This logically follows from the state of prelest. A sincere repentant prayer, confession, turning with faith to the Sacraments could have stopped her, but she had not known such faith since childhood. Apparently, the author did not know such faith either. It was not religiosity that was the cause of the heroine’s tragedy, as both communists and liberals like to emphasize, but, on the contrary, its complete absence. The religiosity of the heroine that Ostrovsky showed us has nothing to do with the actual religious experience of our ancestors. The writer took on the task of depicting a subject about which he had completely distorted ideas, but in our school this is still presented as true knowledge of the reality of that time. It's time to understand: the idea of ​​faith must be drawn from the fence of the Church, and not from the pages of unbelieving writers.
N. Lobastov

The idea of ​​repentance and the problem of sin are associated with the tradition of ancient theater. However, for the people of antiquity, the concept of sin and repentance differed from the Christian one. Heroes of the pre-Christian era turn to temples with a request to perform a cleansing rite, to pay off, making sacrifices to the gods. Christian repentance as an internal cleansing represents an extremely important step forward in the moral development of mankind.

In A. N. Ostrovsky’s play “The Thunderstorm,” written in 1859, questions of morality are raised very sharply. Already in the title itself is the idea of ​​God's punishment for sins.

The action takes place in the city of Kalinov, located on the high bank of the Volga. The name is fictitious and is associated with oral folk art. Viburnum, symbol of bitter female destiny, is associated with the image of Katerina, a married woman who fell in love with another person. In fairy tales and epics, battles between Russian heroes and the miracle of jud take place on Kalinov Bridge, so it can be argued that the name of the town contains a motif of struggle. The action of the play is not driven by an external conflict - the confrontation between the proud Katerina, who does not tolerate “vain lies,” and her mother-in-law Marfa Petrovna Kabanova, who “will eat her family.” The plot spring is internal conflict– Katerina’s struggle with her sin. This tragic conflict of the heroine with herself is insoluble and is associated with the idea of ​​repentance. Katerina feels betrayal of her husband as a sin that must be repented of, which cannot be eliminated “until the grave.” She does not forgive herself first of all, therefore she is not able to forgive another. A desperate woman cannot even imagine that someone can forgive her. About her husband who forgave her and is ready to forget everything. Katerina says: “His caress is worse to me than beatings.” It is possible that Tikhon’s Christian position causes new internal torment for the heroine. She feels her guilt even more strongly. Kabanikha’s moral persecution, on the contrary, to some extent alleviates Katerina’s consciousness of guilt. She thinks that suffering in earthly life atones for her sins in the future life.

Why does Katerina repent, although she does not believe in forgiveness? For her religious, almost fanatical consciousness, the thought of committing a sin is intolerable. From the point of view of a devout believer, the husband is God, the wife is the church. Cheating on your husband means falling away from God, betraying your faith.

The motif of sin permeates the entire play. Already in the first act, when Katerina admits to Varvara that she has fallen in love with someone else, and after this a half-crazed lady appears and predicts that “beauty leads into a whirlpool,” the motive of sin begins to clearly sound. We hear it in Varvara’s words about the lady who sinned from a young age, and now decided to guide others on the right path. This motive of sin is also felt in Katerina’s fear of a thunderstorm. The poor woman is not afraid of death, but of the fact that a thunderstorm will overtake her with sinful thoughts, and she will appear before God “all as is,” without repentance. The name "Katerina" translated from Greek means "pure". the heroine does not tolerate internal “impurity”; she is tormented by the thought of her own sinfulness.

The culmination of the heroine's moral torment occurs in the fourth act. What was the reason for the heroine’s nationwide repentance? A thunderstorm has broken out, and the Kalinovites are hiding from its thunder in a dilapidated gallery, on the walls of which fiery hell is painted. A thunderstorm has broken out in Katerina’s soul; she is close to insanity. From Varvara’s words we learn about the unbearable moral torment of a woman; she is ready at any moment to “thump” at her feet and admit her sin. Internal anxiety in the heroine’s soul is growing. Literally everything torments her. And Kabanikha’s admonition that one must behave in such a way as not to be afraid of thunderstorms. And Tikhon’s humorous statement: “Repent, Katya, it will be better for you.” And the prophecy of the newly appeared lady. And the Kalinovites’ conversations about the “unusual” color of the cloud and that it will definitely kill someone. Prayer does not save Katerina: she sees an image of fiery hell on the wall. The heroine’s soul is torn to pieces: “My whole heart was torn to pieces! I can’t stand it anymore!” The culmination of both the play and Katerina’s mental torment comes. The scene of repentance in public is reminiscent of Raskolnikov’s repentance scene, which is chronologically later. It is possible that Dostoevsky created this episode not without the influence of Ostrovsky.

All details of the play are subordinated to the task of revealing the tragic conflict. It is not the external action that develops, but the internal one - the struggle in Katerina’s soul flares up more and more. None of the characters in the play are Katerina’s rival in this moral duel, which testifies to her deepest conscience. Not the hypocritical wanderer Feklusha, who admits to herself only one sin - gluttony. Neither Glasha, reproaching the wanderers for their

constant intrigues against each other. Neither Dikoy, in whose soul there is only the dim light of truth. IN Lent Out of habit, he cursed the peasant who came for the settlement, and then, coming to his senses, lay at his feet and asked for forgiveness. But the “scold” Dikoy is a Christian only formally. As a pagan, he understands repentance as externally effective remedy, but not internal cleansing.

Katerina realizes her sin in a Christian way, but she is not yet such a Christian as to have unlimited faith in the mercy of the Creator. Brought up in an atmosphere of love, warmth and beauty, she perceives faith in God only with poetic side. She does not believe in the rebirth of man, in the resurrection of his soul through suffering, repentance and atonement. For her, repentance turns into self-curse. Impatient, hot-tempered, she arbitrarily takes her own life, committing an even more serious sin.

(471 words) Katerina Kabanova - main character plays by A.N. Ostrovsky "The Thunderstorm". She alone resists the dark kingdom in the person of Kabanova, Dikiy and other conservative inhabitants of Kalinov. An exalted, conscientious and inspired by love woman rebels against the inert and sanctimonious morality of her circle.

As a girl, Katerina lived very happily: her parents surrounded her with care and attention. The mother dressed up her beloved daughter “like a doll” and spent time with her in needlework and prayer. The heroine did only what she wanted, so she was frisky, sensitive and free. But in her marriage, she recalled with bitterness the bright days of her girlhood, because in her husband’s house “everything seemed to be out of captivity.” Tikhon turned out to be a weak-willed husband and did not protect his wife from his mother-in-law’s attacks. The boar took advantage of her daughter-in-law's gentleness and respect, constantly reproaching and humiliating her. The longing for freedom and love is heard in Katerina’s monologue when she regrets that people do not fly like birds. These words reveal her desire for independence and unhappiness in her marriage. At the same time, Katerina bitterly repents that she does not feel love for her husband. She calls attraction to Boris a sin and does not want to see him, so as not to fan the flames of sinful passion. The heroine believes in God and is afraid of temptation, but at the same time admits the obvious: “I cannot escape this sin.” According to Katerina, this conflict of conscience and thirst for love will only be resolved by death. The heroine's insight and wisdom allow her to know her fate in advance. What kind of courage do you need to have to accept this lot?..

Unlike Kabanikha and her circle, Katerina is truly kind, patient and merciful, and her faith in God is not ostentatious, but real. It is religious feeling and natural honesty that force her to confess her sin publicly. She cannot keep love and guilt within herself, she cannot deceive her husband. This is how she, an exalted and proud noblewoman, differs from the merchant’s daughter Varvara, who hides her love for Kudryash and runs away only when there is no other way out. Katerina is not looking for calculation and profit; she goes against everything that is so dearly valued in the merchant environment. In self-flagellation she finds cleansing from sins, and in truth - forgiveness of God. Only the “Christians” around her are not ready to forgive, so after her confession, Katerina is under strong pressure from her mother-in-law and general condemnation. But her only fault was that she did not hush up the problem, like everyone else, but openly declared it. Katerina's situation was so terrible that even her deceived husband took pity on her.

The final chord in Katerina’s high-profile story was suicide to the sounds of a thunderstorm. Many say that she could not stand the humiliation, and therefore decided to jump into the Volga. But I think it was a conscious rebellion against the tyranny of thought and feeling in her husband’s house. Even at the very beginning, Katerina openly admitted that she would not tolerate unnecessary reproaches against her, and throughout the entire action, Kabanikha puts pressure on her in order to take away the main thing from her daughter-in-law - freedom of spirit, which she risked defending. Only passing away allowed Katerina to remain true to herself and her beliefs.

In the drama “The Thunderstorm,” Ostrovsky created a very psychologically complex image - the image of Katerina Kabanova. This young woman charms the viewer with her huge, pure soul, childish sincerity and kindness. But she lives in the musty atmosphere of the “dark kingdom” of merchant morals. Ostrovsky managed to create a bright and poetic image of a Russian woman from the people. Main story line The plays are a tragic conflict between the living, feeling soul of Katerina and the dead way of life of the “dark kingdom.” Honest and touching Katerina turned out to be a powerless victim of the cruel orders of the merchant environment. No wonder Dobrolyubov called Katerina “a ray of light in dark kingdom" Katerina did not accept despotism and tyranny; Driven to despair, she challenges the “dark kingdom” and dies. This is the only way she can save her inner world. According to critics, for Katerina “it is not death that is desirable, but life that is unbearable. Living for her means being yourself. Not being herself means not living for her.”
The image of Katerina is built on a folk-poetic basis. Her pure soul is fused with nature. She presents herself as a bird, the image of which in folklore is closely connected with the concept of will. “I lived, didn’t worry about anything, like a bird in the wild.” Katerina, who ended up in Kabanova’s house as if in a terrible prison, often remembers her parents’ home, where she was treated with love and understanding. Talking to Varvara, the heroine asks: “...Why don’t people fly like birds? You know, sometimes I feel like I’m a bird.” Katerina breaks free from the cage, where she is forced to remain until the end of her days.
High feelings, religion aroused a surge of joy and reverence in her. The beauty and fullness of the heroine’s soul were expressed in prayers to God. “On a sunny day, such a light column goes down from the dome, and smoke moves in this column, like clouds, and I see it as if angels are flying and singing in this column. And then, it happened... at night I would get up... and somewhere in the corner and pray until the morning. Or I’ll go to the garden early in the morning, the sun is still rising, I’ll fall on my knees, pray and cry.”
Katerina expresses her thoughts and feelings poetically vernacular. The heroine's melodious speech is colored by love for the world, the use of many diminutive forms characterizes her soul. She says “sunshine”, “voditsa”, “grave”, often resorts to repetitions, as in songs: “on a good three”, “and people are disgusting to me, and the house is disgusting to me, and the walls are disgusting.” Trying to throw out the feelings boiling inside her, Katerina exclaims: “Violent winds, bear with him my sadness and melancholy!”
Katerina's tragedy is that she does not know how and does not want to lie. And in the “dark kingdom” lies are the basis of life and relationships. Boris tells her: “No one will know about our love...”, to which Katerina replies: “Let everyone know, let everyone see what I do!” These words reveal the courageous, integral nature of this woman, who risks challenging ordinary morality and confronting society alone.
But, having fallen in love with Boris, Katerina enters into a struggle with herself, with her beliefs. She, married woman, feels like a great sinner. Her faith in God is not the hypocrisy of Kabanikha, who covers up her anger and misanthropy with God. Awareness of her own sinfulness and pangs of conscience haunt Katerina. She complains to Varya: “Oh, Varya, sin is on my mind! How much I, poor thing, cried, what I didn’t do to myself! I can't escape this sin. Can't go anywhere. After all, this is not good, this is a terrible sin, Varenka, why do I love someone else?” Katerina does not think about the fact that she was violated by marrying someone she didn’t love. Her husband, Tikhon, is glad to leave home and does not want to protect his wife from her mother-in-law. Her heart tells her that her love is the greatest happiness, in which there is nothing bad, but the morality of society and the church does not forgive the free expression of feelings. Katerina struggles among unsolvable questions.
The tension in the play increases, Katerina is afraid of a thunderstorm, hears the terrible prophecies of a crazy lady, and sees a picture on the wall depicting the Last Judgment. In a darkened state of mind, she repents of her sin. Repentance from a pure heart, according to religious laws, necessarily requires forgiveness. But people have forgotten the kind, forgiving and loving God; they are left with a punishing and punishing God. Katerina does not receive forgiveness. She doesn’t want to live and suffer, she has nowhere to go, her loved one turned out to be as weak and dependent as her husband. Everyone betrayed her. The church considers suicide a terrible sin, but for Katerina it is an act of despair. It is better to end up in hell than to live in the “dark kingdom.” The heroine cannot harm anyone, so she decides to die herself. Throwing herself off a cliff into the Volga, at the last moment Katerina thinks not about her sin, but about love, which illuminated her life with great happiness. Last words Katerina addresses Boris: “My friend! My joy! Goodbye!" One can only hope that God will be more merciful to Katerina than people.