person
Murkin
also: Муркин, Афанасий Егорыч, Afanasy Yegorych
A clean-shaven, hypochondriac piano tuner staying at a rooming house whose boots are mistakenly swapped with a touring actor's, sending him limping through a day of work in two mismatched left boots before an innocent explanation backstage is mistaken for slander against a fellow actor's wife, in 'The Boots.'
Reading notes
- The Boots §1 piano tuner
Piano tuning was a genuine itinerant trade in 1880s provincial Russia: a self-employed specialist who traveled between the households of the local gentry and officials -- like the general's wife Murkin serves here -- to service the pianos that were a near-obligatory fixture of any respectable drawing room. It was a modest, precarious livelihood, which sharpens the comedy of Murkin's fussy self-importance and hypochondria.