Natalya Gavrilovna

The narrator's wife, a handsome twenty-seven-year-old woman originally from Odessa, from whom he has lived estranged for years on separate floors of their house. Over the course of the story she organizes an independent, increasingly successful famine-relief effort -- collecting some eight thousand rubles and running weekly gatherings of the local gentry -- which gives her, for the first time, a sense of purpose and 'a way to justify her existence.' She resists her husband Pavel Andreitch's attempt to take over the effort, delivers the story's bluntest indictment of his character (Section 212: 'you're an oppressive man, a hater, an egoist'), and repeatedly demands he leave the house and the district for good, only to be met, on his return from a failed departure, by his tearful appeal not to be driven away.