Zinaida Fyodorovna Krasnovskaya

A young, wealthy, romantic woman who leaves her husband Krasnovsky for Georgy Orlov, moving in with him in the belief that she is beginning a bold, ideal new life. Orlov grows cold and eventually abandons her by a fabricated pretext; the narrator (Orlov's footman "Stepan") reveals both his own true identity and Orlov's deception to her, and the two flee abroad together. Pregnant with Orlov's child, she grows increasingly bitter and self-destructive in Venice, Florence, and Nice, dies shortly after giving birth to a daughter (Sonya) in Nice under circumstances the doctor suspects, but which the narrator and Orlov agree to describe simply as childbirth, may have involved poison.