person
Alexei Stepanych Kvashin
Kvashin
also: Квашин, Алексей Степаныч, Kvashin, Alexei Stepanych
A barrister (присяжный поверенный) whose wife and mother-in-law wait for him at their rain-bound summer dacha for five days; when his wife discovers his town flat has stood locked and empty the whole time, he arrives and talks his way out of it with a fluent lie about overwork on a bankruptcy case, privately relishing having gotten away with it.
Reading notes
- Bad Weather §1 the barrister Kvashin
"Присяжный поверенный" (literally "sworn attorney") was the formal title of a barrister admitted to plead in Russia's post-1864 reformed courts -- a prestigious, well-paid legal profession, which is why Kvashin's household can afford both a town flat and a rented summer dacha.
- Bad Weather §48 They may be merchants' women, they may be Asiatic
"Хоть Азия" ("though they are Asiatic") is Kvashin's private, dismissive aside about his wife's and mother-in-law's merchant-class background, in his closing interior monologue. This reflects a period commonplace of gentry and professional-class condescension: educated Russians sometimes cast the merchant estate (купечество) as culturally backward, provincial, or "Asiatic" in manner and taste, in implicit contrast to a Europeanized nobility and intelligentsia. The remark is Kvashin's own smug, self-satisfied class prejudice -- consistent with his casual cruelty toward both women throughout the story -- not the narrator's judgment, and the translation preserves it in character rather than softening or omitting it.