Ivan Ivanitch Bragin

An aging, fat, once-charming neighboring landowner, the last survivor of the district gentry who used to frequent the narrator's father's house a generation earlier. Summoned by the narrator for advice on famine relief, he proves useless in that capacity, given to rambling anecdotes (including a long tale of a robbery attempt near Poltava shortly after the 1861 Emancipation) and evasive, sleepy non-answers, but delivers two moments of startling frankness: warning the narrator, in the front hall, to 'change your disposition,' and later, near the story's end, telling him outright, 'I don't respect you... your soul isn't the real thing.' His household still keeps on a crowd of former serfs and dependents decades after the Emancipation (per Dr. Sobol,, at Section 311), and his rooms are furnished with the work of the serf joiner Gleb Butyga.