character
Vasya's superior
also: начальник, ваше сиятельство, his excellency
Vasya's superior at the office, a widower who sympathizes extravagantly with Vasya's account of his wife's illness, then -- noticing how pale and exhausted Vasya himself looks -- orders him home and delivers the story's punchline quotation of mens sana in corpore sano, entirely missing that Vasya, not Lizochka, is the one actually suffering.