Pyotr Ignatyevich

Nikolai Stepanovich's prosector (dissecting-room assistant) in "A Dreary Story": industrious, modest, and utterly untalented, a "dray-horse" of scholarship who remembers everything he reads but is naive outside his narrow specialty (famously failing to recognize the names Skobelev or Perov). The narrator privately dreads that Pyotr Ignatyevich will succeed him in his chair.