Marina

The estate's old nurse, a fixture of the household who remembers Sonya's late mother Vera Petrovna and has known Astrov for roughly eleven years. She offers the play's recurring notes of homely, unillusioned continuity -- tea, vodka, knitting, calling the hens -- and its closest thing to an authorial folk-wisdom voice, comforting Serebryakov in Act Two ("the old are like children") and Sonya after the Act Three gunshot ("the ganders will cackle a while -- and stop").