Osip Ivanovich Dymov, a titular adviser and doctor of thirty-one years, serves in two hospitals simultaneously: a resident and a prosector. From nine o’clock in the morning until noon, he takes the sick, then he goes to open the bodies. But his income is barely enough to cover the expenses of his wife - Olga Ivanovna, twenty-two years old, obsessed with talents and celebrities in the artistic and artistic environment, which she takes daily in the house. Passion for people of art is fueled by the fact that she herself sings a bit, sculpts, draws and possesses, as friends say, an underdeveloped talent in everything at once. Among the guests of the house, the landscape painter and animalist Ryabovsky stands out - “a blond young man, about twenty-five years old, who was successful at exhibitions and sold his last painting for five hundred rubles” (which equals the annual income from Dymov's private practice).

Dymov loves his wife. They met when he was treating her father, on duty at night near him. She also loves him. “There is something in Dymov,” she says to her friends: “How much sacrifice, sincere participation!” “... there is something strong, powerful, bearish in him,” she tells the guests, sort of explaining why she, an artistic person, married such a “very ordinary and not remarkable person.” Dymov (she does not call her husband by name, often adding: “Let me shake your honest hand!” - which gives an echo of Turgenev’s “emancipation” in it) finds herself in the position of either her husband or servant. She calls him: “My dear head waiter!” Dymov prepares snacks, rushes for outfits for his wife, who spends the summer in the country with friends. One scene is the height of Dymov’s male humiliation: having arrived after a hard day at the cottage to his wife and taking snacks with him, dreaming of dinner and rest, he immediately sets off on the train the night back, for Olga intends to take part in the telegraph’s wedding the next day and not can do without a decent hat, dress, flowers, gloves.

Olga Ivanovna, together with the artists, spends the rest of the summer on the Volga. Dymov remains to work and send money to his wife. On the steamboat, Ryabovsky confesses to Olga in love, she becomes his mistress. Trying not to remember Dymov. “Indeed: what is Dymov? why smoke? what does she care about Dymov? ” But soon Olga was bored with Ryabovsky; he happily sends her to her husband when she is bored with life in the village - in a dirty hut on the banks of the Volga. Ryabovsky is a Chekhov type of "bored" artist. He is talented, but lazy. Sometimes it seems to him that he has reached the limit of creative possibilities, but sometimes he works without rest and then - he creates something significant. He is able to live only with creativity, and women do not mean much to him.

Dymov meets his wife with joy. She does not dare to confess in connection with Ryabovsky. But Ryabovsky arrives, and their romance continues languidly, causing boredom in him, boredom and jealousy in her. Dymov begins to speculate about treason, worries, but does not show and works more than before. Once he says that he defended his thesis and he may be offered a private docenture on general pathology. It’s obvious from his face that “if Olga Ivanovna shared his joy and triumph with him, he would have forgiven her everything, <...> but she didn’t understand what privat docenture and general pathology meant, and she was afraid to be late for the theater and said nothing. " A colleague Dymova Korostelev appears in the house, “a little shorn man with a bruised face”; Dymov spends all his free time with him in scientific conversations incomprehensible to his wife.

Relations with Ryabovsky are at an impasse. Once in his workshop, Olga Ivanovna catches a woman, obviously his mistress, and decides to break up with him. At this time, the husband becomes infected with diphtheria, sucking the films from a sick boy, which he, as a doctor, is not required to do. Korostelev takes care of him. The local luminary, Dr. Shrek, is invited to the patient, but he cannot help: Dymov is hopeless. Olga Ivanovna, finally, understands the deceit and meanness of her relationship with her husband, curses the past, prays to God for help. Korostelev tells her about Dymov’s death, cries, accuses Olga Ivanovna of having killed her husband. The greatest scientist could grow out of him, but the lack of time and home peace did not allow him to become what he rightfully should be. Olga Ivanovna understands that she was the cause of her husband's death, forcing him to engage in private practice and provide her with an idle life. She understands that in pursuit of celebrities she “missed” genuine talent. She runs to the body of Dymov, cries, calls him, realizing that she was late.

The story ends with Korostelev’s simple words, emphasizing the whole pointlessness of the situation: “But what is there to ask? You go to the churchhouse and ask where the almshouse live. They will wash the body and remove it - they will do everything they need. ”