person
Dashenka
also: Дашенька
Strizhin's unmarried sister-in-law, who keeps house for the widowed Strizhin; woken by the noise of the cupboard being opened, she scolds him first for touching the household's kerosene and its cost, indifferent to his belief that he is dying, and closes the story still complaining of her lot.
Reading notes
- An Act of Carelessness §9 his sister-in-law Dashenka, an old maid
The narrator's parenthetical explains the domestic arrangement: as a widower, Strizhin keeps his late wife's unmarried sister in the household in place of a housekeeper, which is why Dashenka -- rather than a wife -- is the one he seeks out when he believes he is dying, and the one with authority over the locked cupboard.
- An Act of Carelessness §23 nor even by cannon fire
A comic hyperbole -- not even artillery could calm an angry Dashenka -- typical of the story's mock-heroic register, which repeatedly frames Strizhin's minor domestic mishap in the exaggerated language of catastrophe (a bomb, dynamite, an explosion) for comic effect.
- An Act of Carelessness §38 the kind that goes for a kopeck and a half the pound
Dashenka's closing complaint pivots entirely away from Strizhin's near-death experience to the household budget -- the cheap grade of kerosene and what the shopkeeper charged for it -- confirming the story's final joke: her indifference to his suffering was never really about principle, only about money, exactly as Strizhin had accused her of at loc 21.