Zina

Vasilyev's wife, dead before the story opens; a year earlier she had been the lively, pretty ingenue of General Lukhachev's amateur theatrical troupe, when Vasilyev courted her. Her coffin, laid out in the front room, is the first thing the narrator sees on entering the house, and the narrator fails to recognize her sallow, swollen face as the same Zina he once watched on the amateur stage.