The Twelve Chairs

Characters

• Ostap Bender — the smooth operator who runs the hunt: A young adventurer with no papers and no money who takes Vorobyaninov on as a partner and turns the chair hunt into a dazzling chain of swindles.
• Ippolit Matveyevich Vorobyaninov — former marshal of the nobility, Bender's partner: A district registry clerk whose dying mother-in-law reveals the diamonds sewn into a chair; greed and cowardice make him Ostap's ridiculous, pitiable companion, nicknamed Pussy.
• Father Theodore Vostrikov — the priest, the third chair-hunter: Having learned the secret at a deathbed confession, he abandons his parish to chase the chairs alone, ruins his family and ends in madness on a Caucasian crag.
• Claudia Ivanovna Petukhov — Vorobyaninov's mother-in-law: On her deathbed she confesses that she sewed the family diamonds into the seat of one of the twelve chairs of a Gambs suite.
• Bezenchuk — the undertaker: The Stargorod coffin-maker, rival of the Nymph funeral parlour and connoisseur of the grades of the dead; he opens the novel and reappears at its very end.
• Alchen — the manager of the No. 2 old people's home: Alexander Yakovlevich, the bashful thief: he steals everything the old women have and blushes at every theft.
• Ellochka Shukin — the philistine "cannibal": Thirty words see her through life; competing with Vanderbilt's daughter, she trades a chair for a tea strainer.
• Madame Gritsatsuyev — the widow who becomes Bender's wife: "A hot-blooded woman, a poet's dream": Ostap marries her for a chair and vanishes the same night, after which she hunts him across Moscow.
• Victor Mikhailovich Polesov — the "intellectual" mechanic: A furiously busy idler and Stargorod's chief gossip, who finishes nothing and eagerly joins the imaginary Alliance of the Sword and Ploughshare.
• Bartholomew Korobeinikov — the archivist: A former clerk who trades in old requisition orders for confiscated furniture and is himself left cheated.
• Nikifor Lapis — the hack poet: He sells the same poem about Gavrila to trade journals, refitting it to any subject on demand.
• Absalom Vladimirovich Iznurenkov — the professional wit: He invents the jokes that appear under other men's cartoons, cannot sit still for a minute, and loses his chair over unpaid debts.