Nina Fyodorovna Panaurova

Laptev's elder sister, married young and against her father's will to the philandering Panaurov; a once-hearty, laughing Moscow-born woman reduced by an untreated cancer recurrence to a slow, talkative decline over the novella's opening chapters, and the mother of Sasha and Lida, whom she extracts a promise from Yulia to raise if she dies -- as she does, at home in the provincial town, in Part VIII.