person
Nikolai Timofeich
also: Николай Тимофеич, Nikolai Timofeich
A slim, fashionably dressed shop assistant at the "Parisian News" drapery shop, in love with his regular customer Polinka; as he serves her order he alternates between shop patter and jealous, class-inflected jabs at the student who is courting her, reducing her to tears behind a pyramid of boxes.
Reading notes
- Polinka §24 the likes of us
This note flags the story's class-inflected dialogue: throughout the scene Nikolai Timofeich, a shop assistant, repeatedly disparages the student courting Polinka as looking down on "the likes of us" -- shop and dressmaking workers -- as ignorant and beneath him, and later (loc 45) tells Polinka outright that she is "uneducated" and would embarrass a doctor's or lawyer's household. This condescension toward "uneducated"/"ignorant" tradespeople is voiced entirely in Nikolai Timofeich's own bitter, jealous dialogue, not endorsed by Chekhov's narration; the story's irony cuts the other way, since it is Nikolai's own class resentment and self-interest, not any objective truth about Polinka, driving his tirade. The translation preserves his language in character, without softening or adding slurs, consistent with the story's method of letting a speaker's prejudice indict itself.
Mentioned in 1 work (16 mentions)
Polinka
- §4 Nikolai Timofeich
- §5 Nikolai Timofeich
- §11 Nikolai Timofeich
- §16 Nikolai Timofeich
- §22 Nikolai Timofeich
- §31 Nikolai Timofeich
- §35 Nikolai Timofeich
- §40 Nikolai Timofeich
- §41 Nikolai Timofeich
- §45 Nikolai Timofeich
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- §47 Nikolai Timofeich
- §50 Nikolai Timofeich
- §53 Nikolai Timofeich
- §60 Nikolai Timofeich
- §63 Nikolai Timofeich