Korostelev

A small, close-cropped physician with a battered face in "The Grasshopper," Dymov's medical colleague and friend, whom Dymov increasingly brings home to dinner as his marriage sours, so as to spend less time alone with his wife. Awkward around Olga Ivanovna -- fidgeting with his jacket buttons, tugging his mustache -- Korostelev understands the truth of her affair with Ryabovsky well before it is spoken aloud, and looks at her throughout as though she, and not the diphtheria, were the real culprit in Dymov's death. He attends Dymov through his final illness, delivers the news of his death to Olga Ivanovna in the story's climactic scene, and bitterly eulogizes him as a great, self-sacrificing man wasted by a young scholar's need to scrape together a private practice and do translation work at night to pay for his wife's finery.