Contents

Plyushkin

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this articlebyadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Plyushkin" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (December 2009) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Russian. (December 2012) Click [show] for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepLorGoogle Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Russian Wikipedia article at [[:ru:Плюшкин]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|ru|Плюшкин}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Stepan Plyushkin (Russian: Степан Плюшкин) is a fictional character in Nikolai Gogol's novel Dead Souls. He is a landowner who obsessively collects and saves everything he finds, to the point that when he wants to celebrate a deal with the protagonist Chichikov, he orders one of his serfs to find a cake that a visitor brought several years ago, scrape off the mold, and bring it to them. At the same time, his estate is incredibly inefficient; the cut wheat rots on the ground and any potential income is lost.^[1]

His surname is derived from the Russian word for flat bun pastry (плюшка).

Background[edit]

Plyushkin had two daughters and a son, but upon the death of his wife he became a suspicious miser. The younger daughter died and the other two siblings left home. When his daughter Aleksandra Stepanovna visited him several times with gifts and grandchildren, but received no money in return, she stopped visiting. When Chichikov meets Plyushkin, he mistakes him for the steward due to his ignoble dress.^[1]

Plyushkin syndrome[edit]

Today in Russia, the name "Plyushkin" is semi-humorously applied to people who collect and amass various useless things, a behavior known as compulsive hoarding. Sometimes the terms "Plyushkin symptom" or "Plyushkin syndrome" are used to describe such people.^[2]

In English, the words "pack rat" and hoarder are used for such people.

References[edit]

This article about a fictional character from a novel is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. See guidelines for writing about novels. Further suggestions might be found on the article's talk page.