Character Analysis
Victor Fyodorov is Secretary of Commerce in Russia, but that's not what matters most to him (7.126). What matters most to him is that he loves beauty. Though Fyodorov can't sing an aria or paint like Van Gogh, his crazy mad love for painting and opera shows us that you don't have to be a super-talented singer to find art that changes your life.
Take his kind of unusual declaration of love. He tells Gen he wants to speak to Roxane, and he tells her (via Gen's translation) a long story about how years ago his grandmother received a beautiful book of impressionist paintings from a young man (7.122). This may not be how you usually work up to asking someone out on a date, but to him, that's the flyest way to tell a lady that he loves her (7.128).
Sure, Roxane is surprised. Who wouldn't be? But she's kind and gracious in her response. She's going to try to reply to his declaration ("Who are you? This is weird." But nicer), but he stops her and says she doesn't need to say anything. He says it's a gift, and gifts are not about who has given what. He doesn't want to ask her out, he just wants to give her his love (7.133-152). That's pretty nice, right?
Here's why: Fyodorov wants to give her his love because he has learned to love beautiful things, and he sees Roxane as giving him a beautiful thing every time she sings. In a way, an education in beauty (like what he had with his Grandma's book of paintings) is what most of the people in the house are getting as they listen to Roxane, and that's why so many of them find her art transforming in one way or another. But Fyodorov is the one who articulates that experience perhaps the most clearly.
Fyodorov is the character in the novel who shows a particular way of being a great audience. Check out this interview with Ann Patchett where she talks about how writing Fyodorov let her acknowledge the importance of a great audience.
There's a way of loving art that doesn't require much of a response from it or the artist, that just wants to celebrate what's amazing. And Fyodorov is fantastic at this, and at articulating it in a way that lets us as readers understand what's happening—in a book that's all about what art can do. So Fyodorov may not be playing the main character, but he'd totally win best supporting actor.