person
Vasya
also: Вася
Putokhin's eldest grandson, a schoolboy whose father drinks away his good coat and later his grandmother's shawl; forbidden by fear of his father's hangover rages from crying aloud, he learns to suppress his grief silently, and after the family's final collapse goes to work carrying flatirons in a laundry and running errands, eventually nicknamed "the bouncer."
Reading notes
- The Old House (A Landlord's Story) §31 went to work for one of the young ladies... called him "the bouncer"
"Вышибала" (vyshibala), literally "one who knocks/throws out" -- a bouncer or enforcer, here implying Vasya has gone to work running errands and providing muscle for a brothel or similarly disreputable establishment run by "young ladies" (compare the three young lodgers who "entertained guests at home" in loc 2, itself a euphemism for sex work). The narrator's flat, unembellished final line -- he does not know what became of Vasya after that -- closes the family's decline without sentimentality or resolution.