Nikolai Anastasyich Ananyev

The railway engineer who narrates the story's embedded tale, in "Lights" (1888): stout, complacent, sentimental with wine, and given to arguing that pessimism is a natural and even wholesome affliction of old age but a poison for the young. His long first-person confession recounts his chance reunion with, seduction of, and abandonment of Kisochka in the seaside town of his youth -- told with a self-lacerating candor about his own vanity and cruelty that the frame narrative neither excuses nor fully punishes.