figure
Fedya
also: Федя
Zinochka's husband, a state councillor (статский советник) of about fifty with graying side-whiskers, encountered at the post station anxious about his wife's health; he insists the narrator (posing as a doctor) examine Zinochka, tips him ten rubles, and parts with him on good terms. Revealed the next day, in the story's turn of dramatic irony, to be the prosecutor at the narrator's bigamy trial -- the man who recognizes him with visible shock as the fragment breaks off, before his speech or the narrator's fate is disclosed.
Reading notes
- The Night Before the Trial §22 state councillor
"статский советник" -- the fifth of fourteen ranks in Russia's Table of Ranks, a solidly respectable mid-to-upper civil rank (roughly a colonel's equivalent), invoked here by Zinochka teasing her husband: a man of this rank being unable to catch a bedbug is the joke, exactly as in "A Tragedian in Spite of Himself" (see crossrefs).
- The Night Before the Trial §23 Fedya
Introduced here purely as a fellow lodger and Zinochka's husband; the story withholds until section 54 that this same man will reappear as the prosecutor at the narrator's trial, so his introduction should not be over-annotated with information the text itself has not yet disclosed.
- The Night Before the Trial §54 the prosecutor's seat
The story's single turn of dramatic irony: the man in the prosecutor's chair is revealed to be Fedya, the husband the narrator deceived and examined his wife for the night before -- confirming that the narrator's earlier lie is about to have real consequences, though the text breaks off before showing what they are.