For 10 points, name this profession whose practice informed the fiction of Mikhail Bulgakov and "Ward No. 6" author Anton Chekhov.
A member of this profession quotes Gogol's Taras Bulba after knocking out Merzlakov to see if he's a "faker" in Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, which features one named "Nurder" who is nicknamed "Murder." An aspiring concert pianist whose mother reads guests her unrealistic novels tricks a flabby whist player of this profession into waiting all night in a cemetery. One member of this profession battles wolves from his sleigh after a fireman drags him from his bath into a blizzard. A man who joins this profession because his father would disown a priest cites Heine and (*) Pushkin to justify slacking off because its logical end is abandoning religion and philosophy. Members of this profession include "Pussycat" Turkin's brief lover Startsev in "Ionych," Mikhail and Gromov's stroke victim "neighbor" and the morphine-addicted author of a "Country" one's Notebook. For 10 points, name this profession whose practice informed the fiction of Mikhail Bulgakov and "Ward No. 6" author Anton Chekhov.
A member of this profession quotes Gogol's Taras Bulba after knocking out Merzlakov to see if he's a "faker" in Varlam Shalamov's Kolyma Tales, which features one named "Nurder" who is nicknamed "Murder."
district doctors [accept equivalents like physicians or surgeons or general practioners or venereologists (Bulgakov's medical specialty); accept medicine or answers about the medical profession]