Characters
- Maria Andreyevna Ostrakova - a Russian émigrée in Paris, mother of a girl, Alexandra Glikman, whom she left with the girl's father when she escaped from the Soviet Union
- Oleg Kirov né Oleg Kursky - an agent for Karla, deputed to find a suitable legend for Karla's daughter
- General Vladimir - Estonian émigré, former Soviet general, spied for the British for three years, since defected and later retired
- Otto Leipzig - "The Magician", freelance intelligence agent and occasional fraud, who works with Vladimir to take down Kirov and Karla
- George Smiley - retired, former Acting Chief of British intelligence MI6 (nickname Circus)
- Peter Guillam - Head of the British Intelligence section in the Paris embassy
- Connie Sachs - retired former analyst and head of Moscow sphere of British intelligence
- Sir Oliver Lacon - Whitehall's Head Prefect to the intelligence service, aka Cabinet Office factotum
- Nigel Mostyn - young intelligence officer who took Vladimir's calls to Circus
- Alexandra Borisovna Ostrakova - Maria Andreyevna's daughter; identity assumed by Karla's daughter
- Karla - Chief of the Thirteenth Directorate within Soviet Intelligence. The Directorate is also known as the Karla Directorate.
- Sir Saul Enderby - Chief of British intelligence MI6
- William (Villem) Craven - son of a deceased friend of Vladimir, performs a courier job for Vladimir
- Mikhel - Vladimir's émigré friend at the Free Baltic library in Bloomsbury
- Elvira - Mikhel's wife, probably Vladimir's lover
- Toby Esterhase - former Circus man, now an antiques dealer, organizes the trapping of Grigoriev
- Claus Kretzschmar - Otto Leipzig's old associate, owner of a seedy night club in Hamburg where Kirov is burned
- Grigoriev - Soviet bureaucrat in Bern who is drawn against his will into, first, Karla's services, then Smiley's
- Krassky - Moscow courier who handles correspondence between Grigoriev and Karla
- Tatiana - Karla's deranged daughter, usually referred to by her assumed identity, "Alexandra"
- Mother Felicity - mother superior of the facility in Thun where Alexandra/Tatiana is kept
Read more about this topic: Smiley's People
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“White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light.... They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters are they! We never learned meanness of them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The business of a novelist is, in my opinion, to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of human history.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“For the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have no task to keep you at home?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)