Maxim Nikolaich

The town hospital's feldsher (a mid-level medical practitioner without a full physician's degree), an old man reputed to drink and get into fights but to understand more than the doctor himself. He examines both Marfa and, later, Yakov, delivering the same brusquely fatalistic diagnosis and comic, mangled sign-off ("good-day-ance, bonjour") to each; his offhand cruelty toward Yakov's pleading ("the old woman's had her life") sets the story's tone of casual indifference to the suffering of the poor, which the narrative goes on to implicate Yakov himself in.