figure
Marya Ivanovna Odnoshchekina
Marya Ivanovna
also: Марья Ивановна Однощекина
The ostensible heroine of the sketch "Marya Ivanovna" -- introduced as a young woman in a sumptuously furnished drawing room, she is revealed at the story's twist to be only an oil portrait on the wall, a deliberately hackneyed device Chekhov uses to bait and deflate the fussy reader.
Reading notes
- Marya Ivanovna §1 Marya Ivanovna Odnoshchekina
The story's ostensible heroine -- and, as the twist in section 24 reveals, only an oil portrait hanging over the divan. Her cliche-laden name (the patronymic Ivanovna is one of the most generic in Russian; "Odnoshchekina" comically suggests "one-cheeked") signals from the first line that she is a stock device, not a character.