person
Filimon Slyunka
Slyunka
also: Филимон Слюнка, Слюнка, Slyunka
A frail, sixty-year-old former household serf of the Counts Zavalin and one-time locksmith at a nail factory, driven out of service for drunkenness and laziness and now living off his beggar wife's alms; he spends the story pleading with the tavern-keeper Semyon to hand back his pawned gun so that he and Ignat Ryabov can stand out for the spring woodcock flight.
Reading notes
- Too Early! §1 former household serf
"Бывший дворовый" identifies Slyunka as a former "dvorovoy," a serf who worked as household staff (rather than in the fields) on a noble estate; serfdom was abolished in 1861, so by the story's 1887 setting Slyunka has been a free man for over two decades, but the label still marks his social origin and explains his former position on the Zavalin estate before he became a factory locksmith and later a drunkard living off his wife's begging.
- Too Early! §31 we'll get hold of a gun ourselves
Colloquial peasant speech markers run through Slyunka's dialogue in the Russian ("таперича"/"таперя" for "теперь," "одначе" for "однако," "ежели" for "если," dropped verb endings, and oath-heavy interjections like "накажи меня бог"); the translation renders this register through contractions, folksy word order, and mild profanity ("the devil's own blood," "God strike me") rather than any regional English dialect spelling, to avoid imposing a specific real-world accent onto Russian peasant speech.