Ryabovsky

A handsome, fair-haired landscape and genre painter of about twenty-five in "The Grasshopper," already enjoying some exhibition success, who becomes Olga Ivanovna's lover during a painters' sketching trip down the Volga. Alternately theatrical and cruel -- declaring his enslavement to her under the summer moon, then souring into contempt and self-pitying exhaustion ("I'm tired") once the affair becomes routine -- Ryabovsky is eventually caught concealing another woman in his studio, ending the affair in Olga's humiliation. He was widely read by Chekhov's contemporaries as a caricature of the painter Isaac Levitan, an identification Chekhov denied as any single-model portrait, though it reportedly cost him Levitan's friendship for a time.