Ivan Ilyich Golovin is the protagonist of the novella: a Russian judge, a member of the Judicial Chamber, who dies at forty-five, on February 4, 1882, and whose life the narrator defines as the simplest, the most ordinary, and the most terrible.
He was the middle son of a privy councillor of Petersburg, the phoenix of the family: clever, cheerful, sociable, and strict about whatever he took as duty, which was what the best-placed people took as duty. He graduated from the School of Jurisprudence, served in a province, became an examining magistrate when the new judicial institutions arrived and applied the statutes of 1864; then he was assistant prosecutor and then prosecutor.
He married Praskovya Fyodorovna for two reasons, to do something pleasant for himself and to do what those above considered correct, and when the marriage ceased to be pleasant, he took refuge in his work. He lost three children; Lisa and Vasya remained. Passed over in 1880, he obtained a post paying five thousand rubles, set up the new house, and fell from a small stepladder while hanging the curtains.
His trait is the yardstick: pleasant and decorous are the words that measure everything. This yardstick is what protects him until the illness, and it is what the illness puts on trial. The book treats him without villainy or sainthood and leaves open whether it accuses one man or describes a class, because the same life is told both as his choice and as a model copied from the people he took as examples.