Dr. Sobol

The district's zemstvo doctor, a rumpled, big-boned, naively frank man in his forties, at first mistaken by the narrator for a sexton or schoolteacher and jokingly misnamed 'Monsieur Yenot' ('Mr. Raccoon,' from a mishearing of the animal-sounding surname Sobol, meaning 'sable'). Overworked, poor, separated from his wife and children, and drunkenly voluble at Ivan Ivanitch Bragin's dinner table, he addresses the narrator with a corrupted, mock-Italian 'Excellency' (экчеленца) and delivers a long, half-coherent monologue on charity, calculation, and the unchanging hardship of peasant life (invoking the Pechenegs and Polovtsians, Section 286). He proposes to the narrator a businesslike scheme for feeding a thousand families, which the narrator, in a rare moment of plain decisiveness, agrees to fund on the spot (Sections 321-325).