Avdotya Terekhova

The widow who, in the reign of Alexander I, built the posting-house at Progonnaya that becomes the Terekhov family inn; an Old Believer, she is the great-grandmother of Matvei and Yakov Ivanych and the origin point of the family's generations-long, ever-shifting search for a private form of religious observance, a search Yakov believes, at the story's end on Sakhalin, that he has finally completed.