Gleb Butyga

A self-taught serf joiner and cabinetmaker who once belonged to General Zhukov and made the sturdy, still-serviceable furniture that fills Ivan Ivanitch Bragin's house -- a writing desk and mahogany cabinet for Ivan Ivanitch's father, a rosewood chest of drawers, and the couches in the sitting-room. The narrator, contemplating Butyga's work, constructs an extended imagined comparison (Section 268) between the joiner's durable, human-hearted craftsmanship -- built with an 'immortal man' in mind -- and his own engineering work, which he fears is 'paltry,' 'finite,' and built by a man who 'loved neither people nor life.'