Sofia Alexandrovna

Sonya is Serebryakov's daughter by his first marriage and Vanya's niece. Hard-working and plain in appearance, Sonya is twenty-four and has been in love with Astrov for six years. When Yelena offers to ask Astrov about his feelings for Sonya, she wavers, saying, "Uncertainty is better.... After all, there is hope—" Like the others, Sonya confesses to deep unhappiness but is more pragmatic. It is Sonya who holds the family together. When Vanya complains of how heavy his burdens are, she says: "What can we do, we must live!" The play closes with her soliloquy about the value of hard work in this lifetime and rest and beauty in the next.

Yelena Andreevna

A twenty-seven-year-old beauty and charmer, Yelena is married to the already elderly professor Serebryakov. Like her namesake Helen of Troy, Yelena is a woman whose beauty stirs men to action though she herself suffers...