Michael Strogoff

Michael Strogoff

Michael Strogoff belongs to the Czar's special corps of couriers, a man whose defining quality is that he is 'a fulfiller of orders.' Raised by a bear-hunting father on the steppes near Omsk, he has a mother, old Marfa, whom he has not seen in three years, and the mission to Irkutsk will carry him straight through her country. His silence, physical toughness, and absolute obedience make him the one man the Czar trusts to cross a land already falling to the Tartars.

Nadia Fedor

Nadia Fedor is the daughter of Wassili Fedor, a Riga physician exiled to Siberia for ties to a secret society; her mother has just died, and she is determined to rejoin him despite the Tartar invasion. When bureaucratic orders strand her at Nizhny Novgorod, Michael takes her under his protection as a 'brother,' and she accepts the role without complaint. Her refusal to turn back — 'It was my duty' — makes her the moral equal of the courier she travels beside.

Ivan Ogareff

Ivan Ogareff has thrown in with Feofar-Khan's Tartar invasion, and his plan turns on a single audacious impersonation: he will present himself at Irkutsk as the Czar's courier, Michael Strogoff, bearing the genuine imperial letter he has taken. He lies to the Grand Duke with perfect composure, exaggerating Russian defeats to shake the defenders' nerve. His iron will and talent for treason make him the true engine of the invasion, and the mirror-image of the man whose identity he has stolen.

Alcide Jolivet

Alcide Jolivet is one of two foreign correspondents racing toward the front, and he treats the whole campaign as both a story and a running joke at Harry Blount's expense. He notices what Blount does not — the silent young woman traveling with 'Nicholas Korpanoff,' her age, her composure — and teases his rival mercilessly for his indifference. His curiosity and irreverence give the grim journey a second pair of eyes and a lighter voice.

Harry Blount

Harry Blount is Alcide Jolivet's professional rival, an English correspondent whose careful habits — including a proper meal, however rushed the schedule — stand in comic contrast to his French colleague's improvisation. He is so single-minded that he barely registers the girl traveling in their convoy, answering Jolivet's questions about her with blank literalness. His dogged, unhurried reporting tracks the Tartar advance town by town, giving the novel its wider map of the war.

Marfa Strogoff

Old Marfa Strogoff still lives in the house at Omsk where she and the huntsman Peter raised their son, and she has never been willing to leave it. Michael, absent three years on imperial service, has always spent his furloughs with her no matter how many versts separated them — until this mission sends him east through her own country without permission to stop. Her presence on the route turns the courier's iron discipline into a test of the heart.