Nikolai Stepanovich

The narrator of "A Dreary Story": an eminent, elderly professor of medicine and privy councillor in his final year of life, addressed by students and colleagues as "Your Excellency." Over the course of the novella he catalogues, with clinical precision turned on himself, how his family, his career, and his own convictions have grown strange and hollow to him, arriving at the story's central diagnosis: that he lacks a "general idea" binding his life together, an absence he can describe with total clarity but not remedy.