The Song and the Dance

Characters

• the narrator — a painter and one of the three visitors: He recalls with irony a youthful pursuit of refined beauty and a painful encounter with village life.
• Valerian Alexandrovitch — a Symbolist poet: The narrator's companion, who shares his aesthetic enthusiasms.
• Vaska — an admirer of Wagner: The third young visitor at the old estate.
• Kapitonitch, the teacher — the teacher at the Tuma village school: A consumptive man with a fiddle who drills the Christmas show and stages the fable's effect.
• the watchman's daughter — the top girl in the school, who plays the grasshopper: A girl of twelve whose line “I sang all the time” turns the fable against the visitors.
• the little boy in his father's felt boots — a seven-year-old taking the ant's part: He asks the grasshopper, in a reasoning tone, whether she worked through the summer.
• the psalm-singer's servant — a woman of forty in the psalm-singer's household: She hauls water and harnesses the horse herself, then sings bashfully and is kissed at the party.
• Vozdvizhensky — a student on holiday from an ecclesiastical college: The lion of the company, he directs the dance, cutting ballet steps and snapping his fingers.
• the honorary guardian of the school — a notary from another town: He chews his gums with delight, sure the whole drilled show was got up in his honour.