Ivan Ivanych Kuzmichov

Yegorushka's uncle, a clean-shaven, dry, businesslike wool merchant from N. who travels across the steppe to sell a consignment of wool and to track down the elusive buyer Varlamov, taking his nine-year-old nephew along to deposit him at the gymnasium along the way. His habitual dryness and preoccupation with business, never wholly softened even by sleep or churchgoing, is set throughout the novella against Father Christopher's easygoing warmth. A fictional character of "The Steppe," not a real person.