Ivan

Engineer Krysin's nephew, a young poet eager to place his verses in every journal and newspaper; bathing in the pond one sweltering midday, he is kissed on the back by the now-mad carp (who mistakes him for Sonya Mamochkina) and "infected" with pessimism, which he carries to Petersburg's editorial offices and thence to Russian poetry generally -- the story's closing joke about the fashionable gloom of contemporary verse.