Vera Ivanovna Kardina

A twenty-three-year-old orphan, educated at an institute and fluent in three languages, who returns to her late father's family steppe estate in the Donbas to live with her grandfather and her aunt Dasha; she spends a winter cycling through possible vocations (doctor, teacher of peasant children) and rejecting each, then, after a fit of rage at the maid Alyona in which she echoes her grandfather's old cry for flogging, resolves in horrified self-disgust to marry the wealthy, taciturn Doctor Neshchapov as a way of settling into an unhappy but bearable life.