person
Osip Stepanych Dymov
Dymov
also: Осип Степаныч Дымов, Dymov, Osip, Oska Dymov, Оська Дымов
Olga Ivanovna's husband in "The Grasshopper": a plain, quietly devoted titular-councillor physician who holds two hospital posts and privately spends his few free hours advancing his medical research toward a doctoral dissertation and a docentship in general pathology. Overlooked and mildly patronized by his wife's fashionable artistic circle -- for whom his surname sounds "as indifferent as Sidorov or Tarasov" -- Dymov remains uncomplainingly generous throughout her affair with Ryabovsky, of which he grows dimly aware only by its second year. He contracts diphtheria after sucking membranes from a sick boy's throat through a tube to save the child, and dies of it; only in his final hours and after his death does Olga Ivanovna -- and the reader, retrospectively -- recognize him as the genuinely remarkable, self-sacrificing man the story's title ironizes at her expense. Olga calls him only by his surname, never by his first name "Osip," because it reminds her of the Gogol pun "Osip is hoarse, and Arkhip is Osip."
Reading notes
- The Grasshopper §146 Osip is hoarse, and Arkhip is Osip
Осип охрип, а Архип осип -- a well-known Russian tongue-twister/pun built on the near-homophony of осип ("[has gone] hoarse") and the name Осип (Osip), and of the surname-like sound Архип (Arkhip) with осип again. It is also specifically associated with Gogol's servant character Osip in "The Government Inspector" and "Dead Souls," a stock comic-servant type; Olga Ivanovna's private reason for avoiding her husband's first name -- because it reminds her of this undignified, faintly ridiculous association -- is a small, telling detail of how thoroughly she has diminished him in her own mind even before the affair, calling him only by the more neutral, professional-sounding surname "Dymov."