Ursa Major: characters and plot summary

It took three summers of enthusiastically reading a hundred pages, then reluctantly having to put it aside, but I finally finished Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya’s Ursa Major (Большая медведица, 1870–71). I want to put down a few spoiler-laden thoughts of the “obvious, but easy to forget” variety while it’s fresh in my mind, plus a summary and list of characters, mostly as a note to myself for later. For now, the characters and plot: Major characters in order of appearance Parentheses indicate (part.chapter) of each character’s first appearance. Andrei Vasilievich Verkhovskoi (1.1, once called Verkhovskii), a father of three who comes to the town of N. on a commission to buy a property for his wife Lidiia Matveevna. Grigorii Ivanovich Dukhanov (1.1): scheming and obsequious minor official who often changes patrons; over the course of the novel, he gets close to Lidiia Matveevna, then Viktor, after being the agent who helped Zapol’tseva sell Spasskoe. He had worked under Bagrianskii but…