Character guide

Elena Nikolaevna Stahova

major

Also known as Elena, poor Elena, Hélène, Lenotchka

Elena is the watchful center of a household full of talk and small betrayals: her father philanders, her mother weeps, and suitors circle. She has already abandoned music, novels, and dress in turn, and now she wants a purpose large enough to absorb her whole nature. Her seriousness makes her both magnetic and dangerous to the comfortable people around her, and it drives the story toward its decisive choices.

Dmitri Nikanorovitch Insarov

major

Also known as Insarov, Mr. Insarov, Dmitri, the Bulgarian

Insarov arrives in Moscow to study, but his real education is preparation for a revolution: his mother was murdered, his father shot, and he carries the scar of his own dangerous years in Bulgaria. He is poor, proud, refuses to borrow, and answers personal questions with generalities. His single-mindedness gives Elena the purpose she craves and forces the novel to ask what love costs when a cause comes first.

Andrei Petrovitch Bersenyev

supporting

Also known as Bersenyev, Andrei, young Bersenyev

Bersenyev is the friend everyone trusts: he introduces Insarov to Elena, lends money he won't miss, and carries notes between lovers he'd rather not serve. His father taught him he was a workman, not a darling of fortune, and he repeats that lesson to himself as a kind of consolation. His unrequited devotion makes him the moral measuring stick of the early and middle chapters.

Pavel Yakovlitch Shubin

supporting

Also known as Shubin, Pavel, the Artist Pavel Yakovlitch Shubin, Pavel Shubin

Shubin is Elena's cousin and the household's licensed jester, forever sketching, mocking, and striking poses. He loves Elena in his way, but he loves his own cleverness more, and he knows it — he models a vicious caricature of himself as a warning. His charm keeps the novel's social world alive, and his envy of Insarov's conviction exposes what Shubin lacks.

Nikolai Artemyevitch Stahov

supporting

Also known as Stahov, Nikolai Artemyevitch, Nikolai Stahov

Nikolai Artemyevitch presides over the Stahov household with pomposity and casual cruelty, justifying his affair by his wife's ruined health. He cares deeply about appearances and very little about his daughter's actual life. When Elena's choices threaten his respectability, his rage becomes the story's sharpest portrait of respectable tyranny.

Anna Vassilyevna Stahova

supporting

Also known as Anna Vassilyevna, Vassilyevna

Anna Vassilyevna once studied music and read novels, then gave up each enthusiasm in turn until only sentimental brooding remained. Wounded by her husband's infidelities — even the grey horses he gave his mistress from her stable — she complains to everyone in the house, including Elena. Her neediness and genuine love make Elena's departure both a rebellion and a grief.

Uvar Ivanovitch Stahov

minor

Also known as Uvar Ivanovitch, Uvar Ivanovitch's

A retired cavalry officer and relative of the Stahovs, often silent.

Zoya Nikitishna Mueller

supporting

Also known as Zoya, ideal Zoya Nikitishna, Zoya Nikitishna, Zoé

Zoya Nikitishna Mueller attends Anna Vassilyevna as a paid companion, forever at her mistress's side yet never quite part of the family's emotional weather. She answers Shubin's comic despair with the same unruffled smile, plays Weber for a weeping Anna Vassilyevna, and sits alone at the piano when the young people flee to the garden. Her serene surface — pretty, obliging, faintly knowing — makes her a foil for Elena's restless depth and a running provocation for the sculptor who can neither capture nor dismiss her.

Renditch

minor

A mysterious figure who assists Insarov with his revolutionary plans.

Yegor Andreyevitch Kurnatovsky

supporting

Also known as Kurnatovsky, Mr. Kurnatovsky, Yegor Andreyevitch, Monsieur Kurnatovsky

Yegor Andreyevitch Kurnatovsky enters the household through the English club and her father's ambitions, an upper-secretary of the Senate with an official smile permanently on duty. Elena studies him with the cool precision of a naturalist: he is iron, but dull and empty iron, a man who would sacrifice his own interest yet would be a despot to fall under. His dinner-table pronouncements on duty, bribery, and the superfluity of art crystallize everything Elena cannot accept in the life being arranged for her, and his presence sharpens her hunger for something — someone — entirely different.

Annushka

minor

A maid in the Stahov household.

Katya

minor

A young servant girl in the Stahov household.

Augustina Christianovna

minor

Also known as Christianovna

Nikolai Stahov's German mistress.

Prince Ardalion Tchikurasov

minor

Also known as Prince Tchikurasov

A minor nobleman who appears at a social gathering.

Karolina Vogelmeier

minor

A German acquaintance of the Stahovs.

Lupoyarov

minor

A Bulgarian acquaintance of Insarov.