person
Akim Ivanych
also: Аким Иваныч, Akim Ivanovich
Anna Akimovna's late father, the brother and sole heir of the factory's founder Ivan Ivanych; a soft, easygoing, dreamy man with no attachment to money, honors, or power, who worked at trades himself and paid little mind to religious observance, kept by his devout brother on a workman's footing at sixteen rubles a month until a late-life reconciliation. His will left a bequest whose interest funds an annual dole to the poor, and it was his death that pitched Anna Akimovna, then a child sleeping under one blanket with her mother, into her present life of wealth and discomfort.
Reading notes
- A Woman's Kingdom §5 the interest on a capital sum bequeathed by the late Akim Ivanych to the poor and destitute
A charitable bequest of this kind -- a fixed capital sum left in trust, with only the annual interest distributed as alms -- was a common form of merchant-class philanthropy in late Imperial Russia, allowing a benefactor's name to be invoked in perpetuity ("benefactress-mother Anna Akimovna and her parents") without depleting the underlying estate. The scene of ragged petitioners queuing for a share of it, described sardonically by the clerks as "the feeding of the beasts," sets the story's skeptical view of institutionalized charity from its opening pages.