person
Madame Navagina (Zina)
Zina
also: M-me Навагина, Зина, Madame Navagina, Zina
Navagin's wife, a committed spiritualist who explains the mystery of the recurring "Fedyukov" signature as a sympathetic spirit and persuades her skeptical husband to summon it by saucer-tapping, setting off his months-long descent into the séance craze.
Reading notes
- A Secret §17 a spiritualist
Madame Navagina's spiritualism situates her (and, by the story's end, her husband) squarely inside the fashionable 1880s Russian craze for séances, saucer-tapping, and spirit communication -- a parlor fad Chekhov mocked repeatedly as respectable society's substitute for both religion and rational thought.