Olga Ivanovna

The protagonist of "The Grasshopper": a young, artistically gifted woman -- twenty-two at her marriage -- who weds the quiet, self-effacing doctor Osip Stepanych Dymov for reasons she cannot articulate, then drifts toward the more glamorous company of the painters, actors, and musicians she collects as trophies of her own taste. During a summer sketching trip on the Volga she begins an affair with the landscape painter Ryabovsky, persuading herself throughout that her own genius and "good influence" are what sustain his talent. Chekhov's irony operates almost entirely through her self-deceiving free indirect discourse: she experiences herself as a rare artistic soul surrounded by mediocrities, unable to see that the "great man" she overlooks is her own husband, whose quiet medical competence culminates in his infecting himself while treating a diphtheria patient and dying of it -- at which point her illusions collapse all at once, too late, in the story's closing scene. She was widely read on publication as modeled on Sofia Petrovna Kuvshinnikova, companion of the painter Isaac Levitan, though Chekhov denied any single-model portraiture.