Sofya Alexandrovna Serebryakova (Sonya)

Serebryakov's daughter by his first marriage (to Voinitsky's late sister, Vera Petrovna), and the estate's legal owner by inheritance, though she and her uncle Voinitsky have run it for years to support her father. Plain by her own repeated, anguished insistence and in love with Dr. Astrov for six years without his noticing her as a woman, she nonetheless confesses her love to her uncle and, in Act Three, asks her stepmother Yelena to sound Astrov out on her behalf -- learning, gently, that he does not love her. In Act Four she talks Voinitsky out of the stolen morphine vial and closes the play with a long monologue of stoic religious endurance addressed to him ("We shall live, Uncle Vanya..."), promising that beyond the grave they will finally rest.