Ivan Ilyich Shamokhin

A Moscow landowner who narrates, to a fellow passenger on a Black Sea steamer, the story of his years-long, self-destroying infatuation with Ariadna Kotlovich; his monologue makes up nearly the whole of "Ariadne," tracing his idealizing courtship of her, his jealous pursuit of her and Lubkov abroad, his eventual affair with her once Lubkov is discarded, and his slow curdling from worshipful idealist into embittered, generalizing misogynist.