figure
the narrator (noch-pered-sudom-3)
The unnamed first-person narrator of "The Night Before the Trial," traveling to the S-- district court to stand trial for bigamy, who takes shelter overnight at a squalid post station, is caught hopping half-dressed around the stove by a young woman behind a screen, and impulsively lies that he is a doctor to smooth over the embarrassment -- a lie that snowballs into a bumbled bedside examination, a nonsense Latin prescription, and a ten-ruble fee, and returns to haunt him the next day when the husband he deceived turns out to be the prosecutor at his trial. Never given a real name in the text; within the fiction he invents the alias "Dr. Zaitsev" for himself.
Reading notes
- The Night Before the Trial §19 I am a doctor
The narrator's founding lie, told on impulse to save face after being seen hopping half-dressed around the stove; every subsequent complication in the story (the bedside exam, the prescription, the ten rubles, and ultimately the trial-scene recognition) follows causally from this one impersonation.
- The Night Before the Trial §39 Show me your tongue!
The narrator's bumbling mock-examination begins with the single most stock, cliche opening move of a doctor's visit -- underscoring how little of actual medical procedure he can improvise beyond this one gesture.