person

Mikhail Zakharych Smirnovsky

Mikhail Zakharych

also: Михаил Захарович, Михаил Захарыч, Захарыч, Смирновский, Mikhail Zakharych, Smirnovsky, the feldsher

The elderly, fleshy-faced feldsher at Dr. Ovchinnikov's zemstvo hospital, hired through his aunt's patronage; comes to work badly hungover, is struck across the face by the doctor for it, and after a week of maneuvering by both men is made to apologize and promise sobriety, keeping his post.

Reading notes

An Unpleasantness §1 Mikhail Zakharovich
The elderly feldsher whom the doctor strikes across the face in section 28; his full surname, Smirnovsky, is given only later, in the doctor's aborted resignation letter.
An Unpleasantness §28 struck the feldsher across the face
The story's central act: the doctor, without premeditation, strikes his subordinate across the face and feels a rush of satisfaction at the blow landing, followed almost immediately by the loss of that satisfaction at the sight of the frightened nurses. Chekhov -- a practicing physician who wrote elsewhere against corporal violence and the routine humiliation of servants and subordinates in provincial Russia -- stages the blow without any narratorial excuse; the remainder of the story is the doctor's unsuccessful attempt to find a form of amends adequate to what he has done. The scene is translated and annotated here factually, without sensationalizing language, consistent with the story's own unflinching but unsensational treatment of it.