Character guide

Theodot

major

Also known as III Theodot, IV Theodot

Theodot is a muzhik among laborers and a student on a country night, recounting how he tracked his she-goat to a village and found a woman wrestling a black sow in a sty. His story is ridiculous and sad at once, and he laughs at his own predicament while the others grin and shake their heads. His rambling, self-deprecating narration anchors the story's early-middle arc, drawing the listener into the strange comedy of rural life.

Alexander Romanov Shasha

major

Also known as Shasha

Shasha is the son of Roman, and he rioted, kicked up rows, and demanded a winding up of Roman's affairs, turning the older man green with wrath. Not content with his own wife, he took up with his father's mistress—a cook and a soldier's wife—just to spite him, while exhausting his wife with jealousy. His provocations and the family's unraveling form the volatile center of the story's early-middle movement.

Chang

major

Also known as The sick Chang, The Chinaman—Chang

Chang is a dog purchased from his first master, a Chinaman, and taken aboard a steamer bound for Russia, where he suffers three weeks of seasickness and terror in a hot, half-dark corridor. His black eyes and wolf-like fur mark him as something wild yet loyal, and his ordeal at sea binds him to the captain who chose him. His suffering and gradual acclimation carry the story's early arc, seen through a creature's bewildered, sensory memory.

The Gentleman from San Francisco

major

The Gentleman from San Francisco is a rich American aboard the opulent steamer Atlantis, dining in crystal-lit halls while the ocean heaves in black mountains outside. Polished, Mongolian-faced, with gold teeth and a bald head like old ivory, he hastens to dress and rubs his hands in a flush of vital forces, confident in the captain's power over the sea. His wealth and self-satisfaction set the story's early-middle arc in motion, before his fate turns the voyage into a meditation on mortality.

Kasimir Stanislavovitch

major

Also known as April Kasimir Stanislavovitch

Kasimir Stanislavovitch is a man of complex identity—possibly an artist or intellectual—who drinks vodka in an empty hall, his eyes reddening at a gramophone's sweet, snuffling drone. He wanders from hot restaurant to cold corridor, orders wine, and after midnight races by hansom to a brothel, where he nearly fights a stout gentleman and lies dressed on a satin quilt. His intoxicated, dislocated night captures the story's early-middle mood of spiritual drift and sensory overload.

Gautami

major

Also known as Gautami the Lean

Gautami is a maiden of simple raiment and tall stature, called 'the Lean,' who yields to the king's son by the deserted river and becomes his concubine, bearing his child. Her dark eyes, always the same yet full of enchantment, and her unbroken submissiveness define her, even as she leaves the palace to give birth in the hot groves and returns with her newborn. Her story of quiet surrender and maternal ecstasy shapes the tale's early-middle arc.

Constantine

supporting

Also known as Constantine Emile Du-Buis, Emile Du-Buis, Emile

Emile Du-Buis drifts through Constantine after a funeral, a self-styled fin de siècle poet with long hair, black clothes, and one leg shorter than the other. He plays for hours with Madame Maraud's daughters, reads sonorous poems aloud, and grows devoted to the household — but his real fixation is the mother, who calls him 'son' and feels only maternal pity. His feverish sincerity and inability to hold a pose make him both pitiable and quietly dangerous to the family's peace.

Vanniya

supporting

The Gentleman of San Francisco has spent decades amassing a fortune and now rewards himself with a grand tour of Europe, Egypt, and Japan, bringing along his wife and unmarried daughter. He moves through luxury liners and grand hotels with the confidence of a man who believes wealth buys ease, planning each city and pleasure with the precision of a businessman. His sense of entitlement and his blindness to the emptiness around him set the stage for a voyage that will test the very assumptions on which his life is built.

Roman

supporting

Roman is a loud, self-made merchant who boasts about his son to guests and then beats him the moment they leave, unable to understand why Shasha answers only with cryptic defiance. He wants a son who will take pride in the family's wealth and ways, but Shasha's stiff bows and hissed vows of future reckoning only enrage him further. Their brutal, baffled contest of wills anchors the story's portrait of merchant life and the wounds it leaves in the young.

Madame Maraud

supporting

Also known as Madame Maraud Emile, Emile, Son Madame Maraud

After a funeral brings Emile Du-Buis into her orbit, Madame Maraud finds her days livelier, her walk lighter, and her voice more tender — a small, half-innocent pleasure in being the center of a young man's attention. When his passion spills over into hysterics and confessions, she calls him 'son' and asks him not to put her in a ridiculous position, feeling almost maternal even as she recognizes what he wants. Her quiet dignity and the pity she feels for him define the story's delicate balance between affection and refusal.

Semyon Novikov

supporting

Also known as Semyon

Ungainly and out of place in Olga Meschersky's genteel circle, the officer is drawn into a liaison she treats as a game and he takes as a promise of marriage. When she hands him her diary on the station platform and tells him she never meant to marry him, he reads the pages about another man and shoots her in the crowd. His blunt confession to the coroner, and the diary entry he preserves, expose the gulf between her careless cruelty and his wounded, literal devotion.

Anna

supporting

Anna grows up in her sister's orderly hut, listening to Katherine read saints' lives aloud and never asking for more, her fair face often lost in a pensive stillness she explains only as her neck creaking. She loves the roughest work and the plainest pleasures — the black hut, the rush light, the mowing — and blossoms into a tall, strong, exquisitely slender girl without ever seeking the company of girls her own age. Her quiet devotion and her sister's renunciations set the emotional weather of a life shaped by faith, labor, and unspoken longing.

Ivlev

supporting

Also known as Love A certain Ivlev

Ivlev is a visitor to his brother-in-law's estate, riding a hired tarantass through fields of rye and flowers toward a distant region of the province. Idle and observant, he yields to the aimless contemplation that suits the rhythm of hoofbeats and bells, his curiosity piqued by the taciturn young driver beside him. When he stops at a countess's estate and hears fragments of a mysterious love, his restless attention becomes the reader's doorway into the story's haunting heart.

Olga Meschersky

supporting

Also known as Olga, Meschersky

Olga is the girl everyone watches: no one skates or dances like her, no one has more admirers, and even the junior classes adore her. Her charm is inseparable from a certain flightiness—rumors swirl that Shensin is madly in love with her, that she treats him so changeably he tried to end his life. When she is called before the headmistress about her womanly hairstyle and behavior, her bright, expressionless composure hints at the fault lines beneath her radiant ease.

Pashka

supporting

Also known as The happy Pashka

Pashka lies half-reclined in the straw among laborers, biting little straws and grinning at Theodot's account of his ridiculous troubles with a stolen she-goat. His easy, pleasant laugh startles the high school boy listening nearby, who wonders whether the whole confession might be a lie. In a night heavy with unspoken horror, Pashka's simple good humor becomes a strange, unsettling counterweight—proof that ordinary life and its small comedies persist even here.

Father Rodion

supporting

Also known as Rodion, Father Rodion—he

Father Rodion arrives at a peasant family's plot claiming the meadows as his own, waving his stick and threatening to bring a watchman. When the girl's hotheaded father confronts him, the priest—supposedly a man of holy orders—squeals and lunges to strike him, only to have his own stick broken across a knee. His rage and hypocrisy drive the father to a convict colony, scattering the family and shaping the daughter's hard-eyed pragmatism about righteousness and survival.

Kate

supporting

Also known as Katherine

Katherine married young and took her husband into the household, but when he began leaving for whole years at a time she vowed to have no more knowledge of him—meeting him cheerily, mending his shirts, yet sleeping apart like strangers. Childless and quietly weary, she seeks solace at a nearby nunnery and with the holy old man Rodion, learning to read saintly books she intones aloud to her younger sister. Her patient, sorrowing piety forms the quiet backdrop against which Anna's own strange, growing self takes shape.

Zotov

minor

A named character with limited but distinct appearances.

Aglaia

major

Fourteen years in colonial Constantine have transformed the woman who once sailed in the Auvergne: silver threads her hair, her skin has grown golden and transparent, and she governs her household with impeccable, slightly excessive tidiness. Everyone agrees there is no better mother or more charming companion than Madame Maraud, and her husband believes her soul utterly tranquil and open to him. Yet a single earlier incident—an Arab juggler who hypnotized her almost completely in Tunis—hints at a morbid suggestibility beneath her refined composure, a fault line that the arrival of Emile Du-Buis will find.

Ivan Bunin

minor

Also known as Ivan

The author appears as a character or narrator in some stories.

Kiriushka

minor

A minor character, possibly a child or servant.

Phenka

minor

A minor female character with brief appearances.

Elijah

minor

A biblical or folk prophet figure appearing in a story.

Flaxen

minor

A character referred to by hair color, likely a youth.

Chaikin

minor

A named character, possibly a tradesman or neighbor.

Lushka

minor

Also known as this Lushka, a certain Lushka

A minor female character, possibly a peasant or lover.

Nikolai Ivannich

minor

A named character with a patronymic, likely a local figure.

The Officer

minor

A military officer appearing in a scene.

Nicanor Matveich

minor

A named character with a patronymic, likely a local elder.

Makar

minor

A minor character, possibly a peasant or worker.

Khvoshchinsky

minor

Also known as this Khvoshchinsky

A named character, possibly a landowner or eccentric.

Carmela

minor

An Italian female character with a minor role.

Pakhomka

minor

A minor character, possibly a peasant or worker.

The Colonel

minor

A military officer with a minor narrative role.

M. Maraud

minor

A male relative of Madame Maraud, possibly her husband.

Alexey Mikhailovitch Malyntin

minor

Also known as Malyntin

A named character with a formal title, possibly a landowner.

Vera

minor

A female character with a brief but named role.

Polkanikha

minor

Also known as this Polkanikha

A minor female character, possibly a widow or elder.

Koslov

minor

A named character, possibly a merchant or traveler.

The Englishman

minor

A foreign character appearing in a story.

Luigi

minor

An Italian character, possibly a servant or musician.

The Master

minor

A figure of authority, possibly a landowner or employer.

D. H. Lawrence

minor

Also known as Lorenzo

The author appears as a character or reference.

Postnii

minor

A minor character, possibly a monk or ascetic.

Simon

minor

A biblical or folk name appearing in a story.

Kostiya

minor

A diminutive name, possibly a child or servant.

John

minor

Also known as John the Hairy

A character with a descriptive epithet, possibly a hermit.

Isaac the Anchorite

minor

Also known as Isaac

A religious recluse appearing in a story.

Nast

minor

A minor female character, possibly a servant.

Mara

minor

A female character with a brief appearance.

Madame Bonnay

minor

A French female character with a minor role.

Elise

minor

A female character, possibly a child or young woman.

Mark the Grave Digger

minor

A laborer associated with death or burial.