person
Nazarych
also: Назарыч, Avet Nazarych
The bald, sharp-eyed Old Believer director of Anna Akimovna's factory, who along with the estate bailiff handles the lawsuits and dismissals that leave Anna Akimovna uneasy. He despises and mistreats the schoolteacher at the factory school for no reason he can articulate, withholding his salary and installing a hostile watchman to drive him out; an anonymous letter late in the story accuses him of taking a thousand-ruble bribe on an iron purchase. Anna Akimovna knows he split more than fifteen thousand rubles with the lawyer Lysevich from a timber sale after her father's death, but is too afraid of Nazarych to challenge him.
Reading notes
- A Woman's Kingdom §13 dismiss some twenty men for absenteeism
The imagined post-holiday dismissals -- twenty workers driven off "like dogs" for missing work during the days-long Orthodox Christmas observance -- register as an early instance of the gap between the household's lavish, drawn-out holiday customs (see Section 111's "there's actually a good deal of cruelty in these holiday customs") and the workers' precarious economic position, a tension Anna Akimovna feels but never acts on.
- A Woman's Kingdom §109 a distant relation of his wife's, a drunken peasant
Nazarych's petty campaign against the schoolteacher -- withholding pay, undermining his authority, and finally installing a hostile watchman to humiliate him in front of his pupils -- is one of several small instances (see also the anonymous bribery accusation against Nazarych, Section 241) establishing him as a locus of unchecked, low-level abuse of factory authority that Anna Akimovna is aware of but too intimidated to correct, mirroring her larger inability to govern the business she nominally owns.
- A Woman's Kingdom §241 rancid cooking oil that smelled of kerosene
The anonymous letters Anna Akimovna reads late at night -- one accusing the factory shop of selling adulterated cooking oil to workers, another accusing Nazarych of taking a bribe on an iron purchase -- are the story's starkest, least mediated glimpse of the factory's actual conditions, arriving, pointedly, on the same night she has spent daydreaming about marrying one of the workers she in fact knows almost nothing concrete about.