character
Yefim Stepanov
Yefim
also: Ефим, Ефима, Ефимом, Степанов
Varka's late father, a peasant who dies of a strangulated hernia in one of her exhausted, hallucinatory memories: a doctor sent by the masters arrives too late to operate, and by morning Yefim has died.
Reading notes
- Sleepy §10 hernia has flared up
"Разыгралась грыжа" -- a strangulated or incarcerated hernia, a medical emergency that, untreated, causes intense pain and can become fatal through bowel obstruction and gangrene; peasant households without ready access to a doctor commonly had no way to intervene in time, as plays out in Varka's memory of her father's death.