person
Kharlampy Spiridonovich Dymba
Dymba
also: Харлампий Спиридонович Дымба
A Greek confectioner among the wedding guests, interrogated at length by Zhigalov about whether Greece has tigers, lions, sperm whales, saffron milk-caps, and lobsters, answering every question in the same broken-Russian refrain ("everysing is there"); later gives a rambling, uncomprehending toast, in Chekhov's "The Wedding" (1889).
Reading notes
- The Wedding §74 nossing / everysing
The translation's broken English ("nossing," "everysing," "sing" for "thing") reproduces the same comic register -- a th-to-s substitution standing in for the Russian ch/ts substitution -- as an equivalent-effect rendering of a device already built into Chekhov's own text, not something added by the translation.
- The Wedding §97 electric lighting
Electric lighting was still a novelty and a marker of modern prestige in Russia circa 1889 (Moscow's and St. Petersburg's first public electric street illuminations date only to the mid-1880s); Dymba's complaint that "Russia alone lags behind" launches Zhigalov's extended comic tirade (locs. 99-101) against electricity as a swindle, pitting old-fashioned suspicion against a guest's genteel cosmopolitanism.
- The Wedding §144 Which is Russia and which is Greece
Dymba's toast, pressed into speaking by the other guests, collapses into an incoherent loop restating the same non-sequitur ("which is Russia and which is Greece") without ever completing a thought -- a comic set piece on being forced into a performance of eloquence one cannot actually deliver, that closes exactly where it began.