Kiryak

Nikolai's brother, husband of Marya, and the novella's most violently drawn figure in Chekhov's "Peasants" (Мужики, 1897): a forest watchman for a merchant, dismissed for drunkenness, who repeatedly comes home drunk and beats Marya without mercy (his shouted "Ma-a-rya!" is the novella's recurring note of dread), and who is at one point led out and flogged with birch rods. He also appears, drunk and demanding money from Olga, in the discarded draft continuation chapters given in this corpus under "Unfinished [Schulz]" (work id neokonchennoe-shulc).