A Strange Story

Characters

• Mr. X — narrator and observer: An educated traveller trying to understand a young woman's unusual choice.
• Sophie (Sophia Vladimirovna) — the daughter of a rich tax-farm financier of T—: She seeks a teacher who lives out self-abasement; she runs away and follows the holy fool, who calls her Akulina.
• Vassily Nikititch — a townsman clairvoyant, later a holy fool: Illiterate and epileptic, he shows the visitor his dead tutor, and later wanders in chains as a holy fool.
• Ardalion — the hotel waiter, a former valet: A pert, self-styled educated servant; it is he who offers the narrator a sight of the dead.
• Mastridia Karpovna — Vassily’s foster-mother, a seller of soaked apples: A shrewd old woman; she takes ten roubles, dictates the rules of the séance, and fusses over her son after it.
• V. G. B., Sophie’s father — a landowner and financier, an old friend of the narrator’s father: Widowed and enriched by lending to tax-farmers; he indulged his daughter and was shattered by her flight.
• old Dessaire — the narrator’s dead French tutor: Green coat, jabot, two purple warts on his brow — a figure impossible to fake, and it duly appears.