Nikita Antonovich Rovnev
About
Nikita is a miserable small man. His life has been hard and he has created a lot of suffering for himself. He tends to be quiet and somewhat sullen. He often says the wrong things out of impatience and lack of forethought, but he is kind at his core.
He is short, underweight, and asthmatic. People don't generally respect him and he has come to terms with that. Living as a Siberian convict he is also generally dirty, flea bitten, and sunburnt.
Before Siberia
Nikita grew up as the privileged son of a wealthy land owner. He was a very sickly child, always fighting with a cough or some other problem. His parents struggled to connect with him, his mother seeing him as a disappointment and his father hesitating to get attached to him lest he die of illness.
He went to college in St Petersburg, with hopes of becoming a lawyer. He was smart and did well with legal documents. His time in college went awry when he began taking laudanum to help with his cough. He quickly became addicted and lost interest in school.
After wasting a lot of his fathers money, he drops out of school and returns home. The doctor in his town tells his parents to get him off laudanum, and he handles the withdrawal badly. In the midst of being sick and miserable with withdrawals, his cousin visits and harangues him for his failures. This ends when Nikita bashes his rib cage in with a carpenters axe. He is sentenced to 12 years hard labor in Siberia for murder.
Text
In 1884, on the Russian owned island of Sakhalin, a collegiate assessor fresh from St. Petersburg takes over administration at the Alexandrovsk Post prison. Him and his three sons learn to work with both the officials and the convicts, and find out how wildly different life in Siberia is compared to their home in European Russia.
Sveltana
Nikita is not very good with people, nonetheless women, but he does have access to more rations than the average convict- a trait that Svetlana really likes. She is a married woman who followed her husband to Siberia. She despises her husband, but she didn't have any better options. Now she is doing her best to fight off starvation under the weight of his gambling debts, and Nikita is the answer to that problem.
Dmitri
In 1884, on the Russian owned island of Sakhalin, a collegiate assessor fresh from St. Petersburg takes over administration at the Alexandrovsk Post prison. Him and his three sons learn to work with both the officials and the convicts, and find out how wildly different life in Siberia is compared to their home in European Russia.
Godiva
In 1884, on the Russian owned island of Sakhalin, a collegiate assessor fresh from St. Petersburg takes over administration at the Alexandrovsk Post prison. Him and his three sons learn to work with both the officials and the convicts, and find out how wildly different life in Siberia is compared to their home in European Russia.