person
Father Onisim
also: отец Онисим, Onisim
A small, decrepit, long-retired priest whom Shilokhvostov believes deliberately crosses his path on election days to doom his candidacy out of spite over Shilokhvostov's irreverent views; Onisim once refused Shilokhvostov admission to office over an impious drinking-song incident and later returns his bribe of oats and tea as incorruptible.
Reading notes
- Not Fated! §11 twenty years out of a parish
A priest "za shtatom" ("out of the establishment," i.e. without an assigned parish) had been retired or removed from active clerical duty but retained his priestly status; twenty years in that state marks Father Onisim as elderly and long since put out to pasture, sharpening the absurdity of Shilokhvostov's dread of him.
- Not Fated! §22 incorruptible
Onisim's refusal of Shilokhvostov's gift of oats and tea -- and his blunt message that no bribe, however large, could move him -- casts him not as a petty schemer but as a man of genuine, immovable principle, deepening the story's irony: what Shilokhvostov calls Jesuitical cunning is, on its own terms, incorruptibility.