Pimenov

A factory worker and foreman of about thirty, dark-haired, broad-shouldered, and strong, who has worked at Anna Akimovna's factory since he was nine years old, taken on while her uncle was still alive. He lodges in a room in the Chalikov family's tenement flat, where he repairs watches and clocks as a sideline in his free time; Anna Akimovna first encounters him there while visiting the Chalikovs, recognizing him as the worker who once demonstrated the forging shop to her. Quiet, tired from work, and awkward in her presence, he becomes the object of Anna Akimovna's romantic daydreaming across the day -- she imagines her late father would have married her off to a plain man like him, and at the evening's game of kings she publicly vows to marry him -- but the fantasy collapses once the footman Mishenka's mockery makes her picture Pimenov humiliated at a table with Lysevich and Krylin.