Characters
The people of literature who carry ideas on their backs.
Alexei Kirillov
The engineer in Demons who reasons that if God does not exist, man must become God — and that the supreme act of self-will is suicide.
Alyosha Karamazov
The youngest brother, novice of the elder Zosima, “the hero” of the novel — who answers Ivan’s arguments not with refutation but with a kiss.
Arjuna
The Pāṇḍava archer who lays down his bow on the battlefield of Kurukṣetra rather than kill his kin — and receives the teaching of the Bhagavad Gītā.
Cordelia
Lear’s youngest daughter, who will not flatter, is disinherited, returns to rescue him, forgives him with “No cause, no cause” — and is hanged.
Edmund
Gloucester’s illegitimate son — the brilliant, charming, self-made villain of King Lear, who worships Nature as amoral force and scorns “the plague of custom”.
Gregor Samsa
The travelling salesman who wakes as a giant insect and remains, inside, more human than the family that comes to find him a burden.
Hamlet
Prince of Denmark — scholar, wit, mourner, avenger who cannot avenge — the most quoted and most interpreted character in literature.
Ivan Ilyich Golovin
A successful, decent, utterly conventional judge who learns, dying, that he never really lived.
Ivan Karamazov
The rational, tormented middle brother who “returns his ticket” to God’s world and authors the Grand Inquisitor — and whose idea that “everything is permitted” kills his father.
Josef K.
A bank officer arrested on his thirtieth birthday for an unnamed crime, who spends a year failing to reach the court that has already judged him.
King Lear
The proud old king who divides his kingdom by a love test, banishes the daughter who loves him, and is stripped of everything until he learns, too late, what love and suffering are.
Lear's Fool
The king’s jester, who tells Lear the truth in riddles, songs and jokes — and vanishes from the play after the storm.
Meursault
Camus’s “stranger” — a clerk in Algiers who will not say more than he feels, kills a man on a beach, and goes to the guillotine opening himself to “the gentle indifference of the world”.
Nikolai Stavrogin
The magnetic, empty aristocrat at the centre of Demons — everyone’s idol, nobody’s master, strength without belief.
Rodion Raskolnikov
Impoverished ex-student who murders a pawnbroker to prove he is an “extraordinary man” beyond morality — and is broken and reborn by his conscience.
Sonya Marmeladova
The meek young prostitute who reads Raskolnikov the raising of Lazarus and follows him to Siberia — Dostoevsky’s image of redemptive love.
The Underground Man
Dostoevsky’s nameless, spiteful, hyper-conscious narrator who rebels against reason, progress and his own interests to prove he is free.
Yevgeny Bazarov
Turgenev’s young doctor-nihilist who rejects art, love and every authority — and dies of a cut finger, having loved and lost.
Zarathustra
Nietzsche’s prophet who, after ten years in mountain solitude, descends to teach mankind the Übermensch — and finds no one ready to listen.