character
Vlasov
also: Власов, городовой Власов, the constable
The town constable who, when townspeople demand he do something about the darkening sky, replies with deadpan bureaucratic evasion that the sun is not in his district -- Chekhov's joke about petty officialdom refusing responsibility for anything not explicitly assigned to it.
Reading notes
- The Wrongdoers §28 The sun is not in my district
The constable's deadpan non-answer is the story's central joke about petty bureaucracy: an event of literally cosmic scale is waved off because it falls outside his assigned jurisdiction, a stock target of Chekhov's satire of Russian officialdom.