Vladimir Prohoritch

The narrator's steward, who reports to him over breakfast on estate matters, including (falsely, as the narrator later discovers on his ride through Pestrovo, Section 240) that the Pestrovo peasants have begun stripping the thatch from their roofs, and later that the investigator has arrested three peasants for the theft of the narrator's rye -- news that provokes the narrator into a fit of unreasoning anger (Section 130).