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Auntie Dasha, at age 42, is Vera’s paternal aunt, and she has overseen the management of the estate since the passing of Vera’s father. She tries to look young and fashionable and walks “with tiny steps with a wriggle of her spine” (Part 1, Paragraph 11). Dasha’s anxiety about the estate is a motif throughout the story, especially as it concerns Vera’s marriage prospects.

When Vera first arrives at the estate, Dasha cries out, “[Y]ou are our queen! Here everything is yours! […] I am not your aunt, but your willing slave!" (Part 1, Paragraph 10). The irony of this statement is that Dasha uses Vera’s inheritance to pay the estate’s mortgage rather than using her own. She is parasitic, expecting Vera to marry well and provide her with financial security. Unlike Vera, Dasha is completely satisfied with entertaining and playing cards. She loves Vera but does not share her curiosity about life. Dasha represents the older generation that is no longer able to effectively manage Russia’s social and economic system. Under Dasha’s frenetic but ineffective leadership, the failing estate is a stand-in for Russia under the control of the out-of-touch, inept monarchy.

Auntie Dasha illustrates the current time period, which is caught between the tsarist past and the revolutionary future. Commenting on Vera’s grandfather’s former beatings of the peasants, she says, “[T]imes are changed, […] one mayn't beat them nowadays” (Part 1, Paragraph 14). She still fires servants arbitrarily, showing that she does not care for their wellbeing as much as she is careful not to go against current trends.

Auntie Dasha is a foil for Vera because she foreshadows the kind of woman Vera might become if she gives in to the culture of cruelty, superficiality, and indifference that characterizes the landowning class.

Dr. Neshtchapov is a minor character who serves a major function in the story: Vera must decide whether or not to marry him and commit to a provincial life. Vera first learns of Neshtchapov through Auntie Dasha, who describes him as “such a handsome, interesting man!” (Part 1, Paragraph 19). When Neshtchapov finally appears in person, he is a great disappointment to Vera. He is described as “a pale, dark man in a white waistcoat, with a good figure,” but Vera finds him “very unattractive” (Part 1, Paragraph 21). She finds his entire style wrong for the time and place, noting that his white waistcoat in the country is “bad form,” while finding that his “elaborate politeness, his manners, and his pale, serious face with dark eyebrows, were mawkish” (Part 1, Paragraph 23). He doesn’t speak much in her company, which Vera guesses is “probably because he was stupid” (Part 1, Paragraph 23).

Dr. Neshtchapov symbolizes compromise. Vera dislikes him because she senses in him an uncultivated mind and that “for long, long years he had read nothing and cared to read nothing” (Part 2, Paragraph 15). Though he is a doctor, he is much more concerned with the factory’s operations. Country doctors often appear in Chekhov’s stories, and they can be voices of reason or echo the same small-mindedness as those around them.

Neshtchapov has an incurious mind that Vera finds stifling: Though he built a school for the local peasants, “it certainly never entered his head that the peasants were human beings like himself, and that they, too, needed university teaching, and not merely lessons in these wretched schools” (Part 2, Paragraph 17). This is commentary on the ongoing conversation in Russia about the education of the peasants and working class, one of the main social reform goals of the time.

In the end, Vera gives in to her aunt’s desires and, more importantly, her knowledge that she cannot accomplish meaningful change on her own. Besides Auntie Dasha’s comment that Neshtchapov fell in love with Vera’s photo, he has never shown any real interest in her. The fact that he loves her photo, rather than her as a real person, represents the superficiality of the upper class. Vera may find that, despite his exquisite manners, he cares for her as little as he cares for the peasants.