Short Fiction · Characters
Character guide
Key figures in Short Fiction by Aleksandr Kuprin.
Skim names here — open a free preview to see character cards and Character Web beside the page as you read.
Olyessia
major
Also known as Olyessia
Olyessia belongs to the old forest of legends and mysterious powers, where her grandmother's occult authority and the villagers' fear keep her both rooted and isolated. Her love for the narrator is fearless and unguarded, yet she is caught between his world and her own, sensing his hesitation even as she dismisses her grandmother's prophecy that he will ruin and desert her. Her willingness to leave everything behind forces the reader to confront what her lover will risk in return.
Sasha
major
Also known as Sasha I Gambrinous, Gambrinous
Sasha plays violin at the Gambrinus, a beer hall where lonely men, students, and misfits gather, and his playing becomes the emotional center of their evenings. He is generous and open-hearted, pouring himself into his music and into the lives of those around him, yet the gap between his art and his circumstances gives his cheerfulness a quiet ache. His presence shapes the story's world, turning a shabby drinking spot into a stage for the yearnings of everyone who passes through.
Sulamith
major
Also known as the beautiful Sulamith
Sulamith tends her brother's vineyard on the slopes outside Jerusalem, a lowly keeper of vines whose beauty draws the attention of watchmen and, ultimately, of King Solomon himself. She is lithe, fearless, and utterly given over to her love, running through the night past leering guards and back to the wall where the king waits for her. Her passion transforms her from a nameless girl into the woman whose love the story insists will outlast every kingdom and king.
Captain Ribnikov
major
Also known as Staff-Captain Ribnikov, Ribnikov, Vassily Alexandrovich Ribnikov
Ribnikov appears in St. Petersburg as a Russian staff-captain, but his Japanese features, strange passion, and delirious cries of 'Banzai!' mark him as something other than he seems. He drifts through the company of barristers, actresses, and night-revellers, arousing both pity and suspicion, while his true allegiance remains hidden beneath a surface of charm and vulnerability. His presence turns an ordinary social evening into a quiet crisis of loyalty and observation, setting the story's machinery of detection in motion.
King Solomon
major
Also known as Solomon
Solomon rules Israel in splendor, surrounded by the treasures of Hiram of Tyre and the mysteries of Isis and Osiris, a king whose wisdom is legendary and whose power seems absolute. Yet his first and last love, the vineyard girl Sulamith, undoes his composure and reveals a man capable of tenderness, apology, and joy. Their love becomes the story's central claim: that every woman who loves is a queen, and that love is strong as death.
Princess Vera Sheyin
major
Also known as Vera, Princess Vera Nikolayevna Sheyin, Vera Nikolayevna, Sheyin
Princess Vera Sheyin moves through the upper reaches of society while managing her husband's dwindling estate with unspoken sacrifices, cutting flowers for a dinner she can barely afford. Her marriage has settled into sincere friendship rather than passion, and her days are shaped by duty, economy, and the quiet melancholy of a summer's end. When a mysterious gift arrives, her carefully maintained composure is tested by a devotion she never asked for and cannot easily dismiss.
Buzyga
supporting
Also known as Buzyga
Buzyga dominates the fishermen's camp not by noise but by sheer physical presence — slow motions, red-haired hands, a neck like a bull's — and by the casual authority with which he pours whiskey down a coughing child. He treats Vasil with a startling, sudden gentleness, calling him a future thief with something like pride, then forgets him the moment Kozel's story begins. His indifference and his flashes of warmth make him the gravitational center of the boy's dangerous education.
Kashintzev
supporting
Also known as Kashintzev
Kashintzev arrives at Khatzkel's inn hungry and matter-of-fact, ordering food with the calm of a man used to being served, only to watch a drunk peasant howl slurs and threats at his trembling host. He is a quiet witness to the casual cruelty and precariousness of provincial life, neither intervening nor looking away. His presence frames the story's early tension between Russian officer and Jewish innkeeper, between appetite and unease.
Kostromsky
supporting
Also known as the astonished Kostromsky
Kostromsky belongs to the smoky, ink-stained milieu of 'The Glory of Petrograd,' where reporters drink, quarrel, and invent scandals about one another between deadlines. He is less a distinct actor than a fixture of that world — the kind of officer whose handshake is too violent and whose stories are too loud. His presence helps establish the raffish, morally blurred society Schavinsky navigates before the duel and intrigue begin.
Vladimir Ivanovich Schavinsky
supporting
Also known as Schavinsky, Vladimir Ivanovich
Schavinsky moves easily between the drawing rooms of society and the dingy back room of 'The Glory of Petrograd,' where reporters scribble and drink and trade unprintable gossip. He is generous, amused, and quietly fastidious — he thinks 'Swine!' at a spitting officer — yet he keeps coming back to the rough company. His painter's eye and social ease make him the natural lens through which the story's overlapping worlds of art, journalism, and violence come into focus.
Anna Friedrichovna
supporting
Also known as Anna, Anna Nikolayevna Friesse, Anna Nikolayevna
Anna Friedrichovna moves through drawing rooms and race-day chatter with the fluency of someone who has never had to work for her place. She tells stories of Gorojhevsky nailing a card-sharp's pack to the table with a revolver as if it were charming, and her presence polices the flirtations of younger women like Alychka. Her gossip and her timing — always returning at the wrong moment — make her a quiet agent of the story's social tensions.
Yasha
supporting
Also known as Yasha
Yasha serves in the narrator's father's household, yet carries himself with an authority no servant should possess and no master can account for. He despises written words as money-making tricks, prefers lying on his box lost in thought, and grooms the broken-down horse Matsko and the disgraceful dog Bouton with fierce, particular pride. His stubborn dignity and his strange inner life make him the emotional center of the story's early portrait of Jewish provincial childhood.
Yarmola
supporting
Also known as II Yarmola, Yarmola Popruzhuk
Yarmola serves the narrator of 'The Witch' as servant, hunting companion, and unwitting comic foil, his lean bearded face betraying agonies of thought over letters that refuse to resolve into words. His longing for literacy is real and touching, yet he can spend ten minutes on 'ma' and forget it entirely, while his single-barrelled gun and eager tracking of hares reveal a quieter competence. His patient, baffled devotion grounds the story's early domestic scenes and gives the narrator's remote theorizing a human counterweight.
Emerald
supporting
Also known as III Emerald, VI Emerald
Emerald's early life is a blur of races, English trainers, and the beloved stablemates Onieguine and Vassili, before a long railway journey deposits him in an unfamiliar stable where he is kept alone and left to pine. His beautiful body weakens from inaction, and the sleepy, black-eyed stablemaster who silently pours him oats inspires an incomprehensible fear. The horse's inability to understand human cruelty — his trust in the very hand that feeds him — makes his slow isolation the story's quiet engine of dread.
Sergey Kondrashov
supporting
Also known as Kondrashov, Sergey, little Sergey
Kondrashov moves through the saloon of Petersburg's reporting world, a milieu of blackmailers, extortionists, and the inseparable Three Musketeers, where reputations are invented and destroyed over drinks. His voluptuousness is so notorious it has become his identity, and his presence in the room marks the moral texture of the company Schavinsky keeps. He matters less as an actor than as atmosphere — a living symptom of the city's appetite for sensation that the story's early scenes quietly indict.
Kate
supporting
Also known as Mademoiselle Kate, Melle Kate, dear Kate
Kate — called Mademoiselle Kate in the household — moves between tender mockery and a strange, agitated intimacy, calling Voskresenski 'my angry sparrow' one moment and seizing his hands the next. Her clouded, avid glance and hurried whispers dissolve his chaste resolves, and the open door she begs him to close becomes the story's charged symbol of what is about to be crossed. She is the catalyst of the middle arc, the woman whose passion strips the student of the ideals he arrived with.
Voskresenski
supporting
Also known as Voskresenski
Voskresenski arrives at the seaside household as a young man of clean ideals and political seriousness, but Kate's sudden, stifled urgency — 'Sacha, my own one' — catches him in a burning, arid whirl that cripples his will and judgment. The open door, the suffocating air, the memory of warm insatiable waves: everything conspires to drown the man he thought he was. His surrender matters because it stages the story's central collision between ideology and desire, the moment a revolutionary discovers he is only human.
Boris Goudounov
supporting
Also known as Boris
Boris Goudounov belongs to the older, grander Russia invoked as backdrop to Prince Andrey's Petersburg whirl — a world where landowners outspend bankers and a man's whole fortune can vanish in an evening. He is less a presence than a measure: the historical weight against which the prince's caprices and the artist Rozanof's quiet rebuke are weighed. His name gives the story its sense of scale, reminding the reader that the extravagance on display has a long and costly pedigree.
Voznitsin
supporting
Also known as Kolya Voznitsin, Kolya, Nikolai Ivanitch Voznitsin
A young officer whose boyish eagerness and moral queasiness make him the raw conscience of the regimental set in 'The Duel'.
Onisim Kozel
minor
Also known as V Onisim Kozel, Kozel, Onisim, Uncle Kozel
An old Cossack, a minor character in a story.
General Anosov
supporting
Also known as Anosov, the Great General Anosov, Major Anosov
An old general and family friend whose rambling, hard-won wisdom about love and fate steadies the Sheyins' household and unnerves its certainties.
Zavalishine
supporting
Also known as Zavalishine, Pavel Arkadievitch Zavalishine
A dissipated nobleman and gambler whose weary, theatrical cynicism masks a sharper eye for human weakness than he lets on.
Vasil
minor
Also known as Vasil
A young peasant man, a character in a story.
Mr. Zheltkov
supporting
Also known as Zheltkov, G. S. Zheltkov
A poor telegraphist whose silent, obsessive devotion to Princess Vera turns a drawing-room anecdote into a quiet tragedy of the heart.
Grandfather Martin Lodishkin
supporting
Also known as Martin, Lodishkin, Grandfather, grandfather
An old organ-grinder wandering with a boy and a dog, carrying a battered dignity through a world that has little use for it.
Movsha Khatzkel
minor
Also known as Movsha, Khatzkel
A Jewish tavern keeper in a small town.
Nikolay Nikolayevich
minor
Also known as Nikolay, Nikolay Nikolayevich
A character in a story, possibly a relative or friend.
Stepan Nilitch Rybkin
supporting
Also known as Stepan, Rybkin, Stepan Nilitch
A journalist and secret police informant whose shabby trade in gossip and denunciation makes him a walking index of the city's compromises.
Manuilikha
supporting
Also known as Granny Manuilikha, granny, Granny, old Manuilikha
Manuilikha lives apart from the village in a hut on chicken legs, surviving on marsh water and the occasional coin from those who seek her fortune-telling. She is fiercely protective of Olyessia and hostile to intruders, yet her poverty makes her vulnerable to silver — she pockets a sixpence in her jaw even as she warns the visitor away. Her secretive past and her refusal to speak of it cast a shadow over the forest household, making her the story's gatekeeper between the ordinary world and something older and stranger.
Salvatore Trama
minor
Also known as Salvatore, Trama, brave Trama
A fisherman and boatman in Balaklava.
Lenotchka
minor
Also known as Big Lenotchka, little Lenotchka, old Lenotchka, young Lenotchka
A woman in a story, possibly a servant or acquaintance.
Prince Vasily Sheyin
supporting
Also known as Prince Sheyin, Vasily, Prince Vasily Lvovich, Sheyin, Vasily Lvovich
Prince Vasily Lvovich moves through the social world of the story as a host and family man, bringing his sister, friends, and notable guests together for Vera's name-day dinner. He is kindly and attentive, but his frivolity and his wife's extravagance sit uneasily beside the quiet dignity of others in the room. His presence establishes the comfortable, slightly hollow world of provincial nobility against which the story's deeper longings and misfortunes will be measured.
Vassili Akinfievitch
minor
Also known as Vassili
A character in a story, possibly a landowner or official.
Samoilenko
supporting
Also known as Samoilenko
Samoilenko is a man returning after five years in Manchuria to a wife he calls Sannochka and a daughter he last saw as a toddler. His exuberance is almost childlike — he tips conductors royally, presses jade and ivory trinkets on near-strangers, and sends reply-paid telegrams ahead to announce himself. His unspent love and his inability to contain it make him both comic and touching, a portrait of longing that quietly frames the story's darker meditations on devotion and loss.
Melle Nora
minor
Also known as Nora, Little Nora
A young woman in a story, possibly a dancer or performer.
Anna Georgievna
minor
Also known as Anna, Bel
A woman involved in a romantic relationship.
Balunsky
minor
Also known as Balunsky
A fellow officer and friend of the main character.
Yureva
minor
Also known as Yureva
A society woman, possibly an actress or singer.
Mr. Rozanof
minor
Also known as Rozanof, XI Rozanof
A character in a story, possibly a journalist or writer.
Jack
minor
Also known as Jack
A dog, possibly a character in a story.
Vanya Andrutzaki
minor
Also known as Vanya
A young Greek fisherman in Balaklava.
Leonka
minor
Also known as VI Leonka, First Leonka
A young boy, a character in a story.
Prince Andrey Lvovitch
supporting
Also known as III Prince Andrey, Prince Andrey, Andrey, Andrey Lvovitch
Prince Andrey plunges into the gambling and carousing of Petersburg and Moscow society, squandering his fortune and his reputation in a whirl of suppers and races. When he falls for the beautiful, indifferent Marya Gavrilovna, her refusal to take him seriously stings his pride into wilder gestures. His encounter with the artist Rozanof, who calls him a fool for burning money that could have fed the sick, exposes the tension between his unrestrained nature and the claims of ordinary human decency — a tension that shapes his trajectory through the story.
Timofeev
minor
Also known as Timofeev - Soumskoi
A fellow officer in a story.
Father Olympy
minor
Also known as Father, Olympy
A priest in a story.
Tommy
minor
Also known as Tommy
A dog, a character in a story.
M. Valerianov
minor
Also known as Valerianov
A character in a story, possibly a tutor or official.
Arto
supporting
Also known as Arto
Arto performs with his companions — an old organ-grinder and a young boy — in the courtyards of summer cottages, balancing on a barrel and pulling a toy pistol from his master's pocket. He is the household's livelihood and its heart, obedient and clever, yet his bond with the boy runs deeper than any trick. When a rich, capricious lady offers to purchase him, the poodle becomes the centre of a struggle between money and love, and his fate turns on the question of what loyalty can and cannot be bought.
Arseny
minor
Also known as Arseny
A servant or attendant in a story.
Lieutenant Lapshine
minor
Also known as Lapshine
A young officer in a story.
Menotti
minor
Also known as Menotti
An Italian fisherman or boatman in Balaklava.
Bouton
minor
Also known as the servile Bouton
A servant or valet in a story.
Yura Paratino
minor
Also known as Yura
A young man, a character in a story.
Eliab
minor
Also known as Eliab
A biblical figure, a character in 'Sulamith'.
Blan
minor
Also known as the calm Blan
A character in a story, possibly a sailor or fisherman.
Yani Lipiadi
minor
Also known as Yani, young Yani Lipiadi
A young Greek in Balaklava.
Katerina Andreevna
minor
Also known as Andreevna
A woman in a story, possibly a relative or acquaintance.
Kharitonenko
minor
Also known as Kharitonenko
A character in a story, possibly a merchant or official.
Lieutenant Tchijhevich
minor
Also known as Lieutenant Valerian Ivanovich Tchijhevich, Tchijhevich
A young officer in a story.
Nadya
minor
Also known as Nadya
A young woman, a character in a story.
Madame Ivanova
minor
Also known as Madame Ivanova
A woman in a story, possibly a landlady or neighbor.
M. Lara-Larsky
minor
Also known as Lara - Larsky
A character in a story, possibly a musician or performer.
Alychka
minor
Also known as Alychka
A young girl, a character in a story.
Adka
minor
Also known as Adka
A character in a story, possibly a servant or child.
Alexandra Ivanovna Gratcheva
minor
Also known as Alexandra Ivanovna
A woman in a story, possibly a landlady or neighbor.
Romka
minor
Also known as Romka
A young boy, a character in a story.
Clotilde
minor
Also known as Clotilde
A woman in a story, possibly a dancer or performer.
Bielotchka
minor
Also known as little Bielotchka
A young woman, a character in a story.
Nikolai Yevgrafovitch Almazof
minor
Also known as Almazof, Nikolai Yevgrafovitch
A young officer in a story.
Sashka Argiridi
minor
Also known as Sashka
A Greek boy or young man in Balaklava.
Captain Markof
minor
Also known as Markof, Alexander Vassilitch Markof
A Russian officer, a character in a story.
Sashka the Messenger
minor
Also known as Sashka
A messenger or errand boy in a story.
Trilly
minor
Also known as Trilly
A young woman, possibly a singer or performer.
Demir-Kayá
minor
Also known as Demir - Kayá
A Tatar or Turkish character in a story.
Falstaff
minor
Also known as Falstaff
A literary reference, possibly a character in a story.
Pavel Arkadievitch Zavalishine
minor
Also known as Pavel, Pavel Arkadievitch
A character in a story, possibly a relative of Zavalishine.
Berger
minor
Also known as Berger
A character in a story, possibly a doctor or official.
Bartholomew
minor
Also known as Bartholomew
A character in a story, possibly a servant or worker.
Mr. Obolianinov
minor
Also known as Obolianinov
A character in a story, possibly a landowner or official.
Dr. Iliashenko
minor
Also known as Iliashenko
A doctor in a story.
