Sakhalin

Nikita Antonovich Rovnev

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.

Confessions of a Russian Opium Eater

The illustration to the left tells you a lot about Nikita. The bottom collection is a timeline. Student, axe murderer, prisoner, prisoner in winter, and finally convict clerk on the right- how his life changed over time. On the right is the main building of the Alexandrovsk Post prison on Sakhalin, where he was a hard labor convict. The middle image is of him looking ill and green- drawn in this style to evoke the sketches and paintings of Egon Schiele. He has long spindly thin fingers and a stressed skinny face. Behind him is the Russian Orthodox cross. Under that is a border of laudanum and eggs- things he enjoys eating. The border to the right is yellow and black diamonds- a symbol that was sewn on the backs of convict coats to denote certain things. To the left of the Schiele image is a roofer’s axe like that which he used to kill a man. Behind it is an old muscovite mica window. Under the head of the axe is an identification photo of him, they began taking photos like these in the 1880s. Under him is a drawing meant to resemble turn of the century illustration. At the very top are dogs, drawing a parallel to his own lack of freedom. .

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

Dmitri & Nikita are coworkers who end up being great friends. Originally paired together by Leonid out of necessity- Nikita lacks interpersonal skills & Mitya lacks focus. Between the two of them they were able to get their work done as well as have some fun. Mitya is very good at pushing Nikita into situations- for better or for worse. There's a definite power imbalance between them early on. Mitya being a well off official's son, and Nikita being a hard labor convict. But eventually they see eye to eye and become immensley important to each other.

Godiva

Nikita & Godiva become friends within the confines of Alexandrovsk Post Prison. They meet due to proximity, Godiva is drawn to Nikita because of his persistent cough - hey believe God can cure him through them. Nikita is too hopeless to stop them from doing this. After some strange faith healing attempts, Godiva decides they are friends and the two stick together when they can. When Nikita becomes becomes a convict clerk and eventually disappear, they assume he died.

GALLERY

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