# Yama — Character guide

> Key figures in Yama by Aleksandr Kuprin.

- [Likhonin](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/likhonin.md): A student who rescues Liubka from the brothel and then discovers that saving someone is not the same as loving her.
- [Liubka](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/liubka.md): A young woman pulled out of Anna Markovna's house and into a cramped student flat, where she learns knitting, flowers, and the limits of being saved.
- [Tamara](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/tamara.md): The brothel's cleverest woman, who spins a year-long romance with a respectable notary while keeping her real life entirely hidden from him.
- [Jennka](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/jennka.md): The proudest woman in the house, who turns her diagnosis into a weapon and deliberately spreads infection to every man she can.
- [Sergei Ivanovich Platonov](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/platonov.md): A journalist who prefers unloading watermelons at the port to writing newspaper filler, and who watches the brothel world with a vagabond's clear eye.
- [Anna Markovna](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/anna_markovna.md): The brothel's proprietress, who inspects new arrivals like livestock and runs her house with the calm arithmetic of a businesswoman.
- [Simon Yakovlevich Horizon](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/simon_yakovlevich.md): A polished, calculating patron of the brothel whose grand theories about rescuing fallen women mask a colder appetite for control and self-regard.
- [Emma Edwardovna Titzner](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/emma_edwardovna.md): The brothel's new proprietress, a former prostitute who rules with a boa-constrictor's gaze, demanding kissed hands and absolute obedience from the women she calls her own.
- [Soloviev](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/soloviev.md): A ponderous, warm-hearted friend of the brothel women who defends Likhonin's rescue of Liubka with real wrath and insists an untouched mind is virgin soil worth cultivating.
- [Simeon](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/simeon.md): A gloomy, stingy pimp who hoards money toward a monastery while leaving bruises on the women he claims to love, and whom the girls whisper is a murderer.
- [Simanovsky](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/simanovsky.md): A self-satisfied comrade of Likhonin's circle who lectures on saving fallen women with heroic rhetoric, then turns Liubka's education into reckless parlor chemistry.
- [Magdalen](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/magdalen.md): A prostitute known as Magda whose tragic past shadows the brothel, one of the women whose ruined life gives weight to the men's talk of rescue.
- [Liuba](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/liuba.md): A freckled, strong-bodied girl from Anna Markovna's establishment, she becomes the raw material for a student's grand experiment in salvation.
- [Little Manka](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/little_manka.md): Known as Little White Manka, she is the devoted companion whose caresses Jennka deliberately withdraws to spare her from ruin.
- [Rovinskaya](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/rovinskaya.md): One of the four hundred women in the public harems, she moves through the brothel's drowsy afternoons as both witness and sister to the others' suffering.
- [Prince Nijeradze](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/nijeradze.md): A Georgian prince whose skeptical grunts and sidelong glances puncture every high-minded speech about rescuing fallen women.
- [Roly-Poly](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/roly_poly.md): A lanky, rickety freeloader who recites doggerel, cadges drinks, and is tolerated by the girls as almost one of their own.
- [Boris Sobashnikov](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/boris_sobashnikov.md): A student comrade whose drunken night in the Yamkas and sudden pity for the women set him on a course of reckless rescue.
- [Volodya Chaplinsky](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/volodya_chaplinsky.md): Chaplinsky moves through the brothel's drawing room as a minor satellite of Rovinskaya's circle, a young man whose devotion is so obvious that she can tease him into mimicking a street musician's head-tossing and call hi
- [Mr. Yarchenko](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/yarchenko.md): Yarchenko belongs to the loose set of students, reporters, and gentlemen who drift from the river to the publican's and finally to Anna Markovna's, and it is his name Nijeradze catches when the party is recounted. Half a
- [Niura](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/niura.md): Niura is one of the women whose daily life in Anna Markovna's establishment forms the novel's backdrop, and she becomes an unwitting audience for the amateur physicist Simanovsky's attempts to astonish a 'virginally femi
- [Zoe](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/zoe.md): Zoe arrives one winter evening in a caracul sacque, a woman of about twenty-six with no makeup and no obvious need, and asks the proprietress to take her on. Emma Edwardovna strips and feels her over like a drover apprai
- [Ernst Andreievich Ryazanov](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/ryazanov.md): Ryazanov sits among the brothel's guests as the one who refuses to sneer, sipping his goblet and answering the baroness's boredom with the melancholy claim that youth and laughter have left human life for good. His soft,
- [Mr. Berkesh](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/berkesh.md): Berkesh belongs to the stream of men who pass through Anna Markovna's establishment, and his reputation for ferocity and shamelessness makes him a name the women register with a particular wariness. He is the type Yarche
- [Jennechka](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/jennechka.md): Jennka is one of the women in the brothel, known for her biting wit and the sullen distance she keeps even from those who adore her, like Little White Manka. When she learns she has syphilis, she refuses to withdraw quie
- [Pasha](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/pasha.md): A character in the brothel.
- [Verka](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/verka.md): A trusting prostitute in the brothel.
- [Kitty](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/kitty.md): A stout prostitute in the brothel.
- [Dilectorsky](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/dilectorsky.md): A minor character who appears in the narrative.
- [Pashka](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/pashka.md): An unhappy character in the brothel.
- [Isaiah Savvich](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/isaiah_savvich.md): A character who visits the brothel.
- [Sonka](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters/sonka.md): A prostitute in the brothel.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/yama_se/characters