Unnamed Russian Woman

The woman in "Knight's Gambit" with whom Gavin Stevens was having some kind of relationship when he returned to Europe after the end of the First World War "was a Russian" (247). Stevens is talking to his young nephew about her, which may be why his account of the woman and the relationship is so vague, but the facts that she went "through a war too" and had to "escape from Moscow" by paying others to help her suggest she is a Russian aristocrat, driven into exile by the Russian Revolution of 1917. And the fact that Stevens says the letters he wrote her "flowed from somewhere around, amid the intestines" suggests that the relationship was primarily sexual (248). At any rate, he says this relationship "did not exist in the same world" as his formal engagement with the Yoknapatawpha woman he eventually marries (248).