Georgy Ivanych Orlov

A Petersburg official about thirty-five, son of a well-known statesman, whose household the unnamed narrator infiltrates as the footman "Stepan." Cultivated, ironic, and fundamentally cold, Orlov reads voraciously but cares for nothing seriously; when Zinaida Fyodorovna Krasnovskaya leaves her husband to live with him, he receives her passively, grows oppressed by the domesticity and emotion she brings, and finally abandons her by lying about a fictitious inspection tour while actually hiding at his friend Pekarsky's flat. Confronted by the narrator's furious letter, he survives it psychologically unscathed, offering a fluent, self-aware philosophical defense of his own passivity when the narrator visits him two years later to arrange for Zinaida Fyodorovna's orphaned daughter Sonya.