person
Filya the One-Eyed
Filya
also: Филя, кривой Филя, Filya the Blind, Shamil, Шамиль
A blind, roughly seventy-year-old former horse thief of Bogalyovka, once nicknamed "Shamil" by the local constable in mocking reference to the Caucasian resistance leader; now reduced, in Kalashnikov's telling, to petty, incompetent thefts far beneath the daring raids of his youth alongside the elder Chirikov.
Reading notes
- Thieves §50 Filya the One-Eyed
A blind, roughly seventy-year-old former horse thief, once mockingly nicknamed "Shamil" (after the nineteenth-century Caucasian resistance leader Imam Shamil) for his fierce reputation in youth; Kalashnikov's account of Filya's decline from a daring raider of army horses to a pathetic petty thief who "bargains like a Jew" (see the following note) frames the story's larger theme of a once-heroic outlaw way of life curdling into squalor.