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Fyodor Stepanych Laptev
old Laptev
also: Papasha
The patriarch of the Laptev merchant family, eighty years old, physically imposing and booming-voiced despite his age, who built the firm's fortune on Asiatic secrecy and casual cruelty toward his sons and clerks alike (he had Alexei and Fyodor beaten as children and had boys flogged in the warehouse); he goes blind over the course of the novella and is left, by its end, isolated, untidy, and dependent on his daughter-in-law Yulia's occasional visits.