Lida Volchaninova

The elder of the two Volchaninov sisters, a slender, beautiful, invariably stern zemstvo schoolteacher who supports herself on her own twenty-five-ruble salary, runs clinics and relief committees, and organizes the district's opposition to the corrupt zemstvo chairman Balagin; ideologically opposed to the narrator's aestheticism, she is his chief antagonist in the story's central debate over art versus practical social work, and ultimately intervenes to end her sister Zhenya's romance with him.