Vladimir Mihailych

Sofya Lvovna's childhood friend and, before her marriage, the object of her desperate love; a thirty-year-old scholar of foreign literature living on his army-doctor father's charity, nicknamed "Little Volodya" for his own long history of seducing married women. He mocks Sofya Lvovna's pleas for meaning with the nonsense refrain "tararaboombia," sleeps with her the morning after her convent visit, and abandons her a week later.