person
Ivan Dmitrich
also: Иван Дмитрич
A man of modest, contented middling means who, believing for a few minutes that he and his wife have won 75,000 rubles in the lottery, dreams himself into avarice, contempt for his relations, and hatred of his own wife -- all dissolved the instant the win proves false.
Reading notes
- The Lottery Ticket §47 hang myself on the first aspen I find
Ivan Dmitrich's closing outburst is petulant hyperbole, not a genuine threat: the story has just shown him complain about crumbs on the floor in the same breath, and the aspen carries a folk association (the tree Judas is said to have hanged himself on, and whose leaves are said to tremble ever after in shame) that makes the line a piece of overwrought, self-dramatizing exaggeration -- the deflated mirror image of the fantastical hopes he entertained a few minutes earlier, not a literal statement of intent.