Anna Akimovna

The story's protagonist, a wealthy, unmarried young woman (going on twenty-six) who has inherited a large factory and fortune from her late father Akim Ivanych and uncle Ivan Ivanych. Born into a plain working family and raised as a child among the factory's workers, she was later elevated by her uncle's late-life reconciliation with her father and given a governess; she now moves uneasily between the genteel upstairs world of officials and lawyers (Krylin, Lysevich) and the household's lower, servants' half. Over the course of a single Christmas Day she visits a petitioner, the ruined official Chalikov, on impulse to give away an unwanted windfall of fifteen hundred rubles; develops a fleeting, half-articulated romantic fantasy about the factory worker Pimenov, even publicly promising, in a game of kings, to marry him; and by the end of the night recognizes the fantasy as self-indulgent nonsense, weeping together with her maid Masha over their own foolishness. The story closes without resolving her loneliness or her ambivalence about her inherited position.