- Plyushkin
Plyushkin (Плю́шкин) was a character in
Nikolai Gogol 's novel "Dead Souls ". He was a landowner who obsessively collected and saved everything he came across, to the point that when he wants to celebrate a deal with the protagonist, 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.Today in
Russia the name "Plyushkin" is semi-humorously applied to people who collect and amass various useless, broken, thrown-away things, a behavior known ascompulsive hoarding . Sometimes the terms "Plyushkin symptom" or "Plyushkin syndrome" are used to describe such people.In English slang, the word "pack rat" is used for such people.
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