person
Yegor Ivanych Eremeyev
Yegor Ivanych
also: Еремеев, Егор Иваныч, Yegor Ivanych, Eremeyev, the mayor, городской голова
An elderly merchant-millionaire and longtime resident of the provincial town of N., elected city mayor; arriving late and comically breathless at the governor's warming pavilion during an Epiphany skating festival, he turns the men's shared complaints about a savage frost into an unsparing memory of his own childhood poverty -- as an orphaned begging-guide for a blind old woman, and later as a half-frozen fish-stall apprentice and then master who beat his own apprentices and family in his misery -- before the old men fall silent and extend their belated sympathy to a freezing young police constable.
Reading notes
- Frost §26 a working man, a beggar, a wanderer
Yegor Ivanych's speech turns the frost from a shared nuisance into a class marker: comfortable people experience it as bracing, while for the poor it compounds poverty, sharpens crime, and can kill. The story does not resolve this observation into policy or charity -- it simply lets a rich man voice it while warm, which is itself the story's quiet irony.
- Frost §26 It fell to me then to lead a blind old woman about the town for five kopecks a day
Child begging-guides -- poor or orphaned children hired or indentured to lead blind beggars through the streets for a share of alms -- were a real and common feature of Russian urban poverty in this period. Yegor Ivanych's account of his own childhood in this role, and of the physical agony of standing exposed to severe cold for hours at a stretch, is presented factually as social memory, not sentimentalized; Hermitsh Press preserves it without softening per editorial policy on historical source material.
- Frost §29 when they put me to work as a shop-boy in the fish stall
This passage and the one following it (loc. 29) contain frank, period-typical content: Yegor Ivanych describes being placed as a child apprentice (сиделец) in an open-air fish stall, worked in freezing conditions with inadequate clothing, and describes -- as an adult recalling his own conduct once he became a master himself -- routinely striking his own apprentices (yanking one by the ear hard enough to nearly tear it, cuffing another on the head) and beating his family when he came home in a foul temper. This is presented in the story as unreflective social critique: the cold and poverty brutalize a brutalized man, who in turn brutalizes those under him, in an unbroken chain the story asks its listeners (and readers) to notice rather than excuse. Chekhov offers no authorial condemnation or comment beyond letting the old man recount it as ordinary; the translation preserves this matter-of-fact register rather than editorializing or softening the violence, and no epithets or slurs are used in the source or in this translation.