Yekaterina Pavlovna Volchaninova

The widowed mother of Lida and Zhenya, once beautiful and now prematurely puffy and short of breath; gentle, absent-minded, and given to earnest small talk about painting with the narrator, she reveres her elder daughter Lida as a nearly sacred, slightly unapproachable figure while adoring her younger daughter Zhenya with open, uncomplicated affection.