Or perhaps just with his character of Egor Semenych, an elderly man whose love of his garden is his life’s passion. Who worries that when he is dead, his garden will go to ruin, and even the idea of his daughter, Tania, taking it over does not console him:
She gets married, children arrive, and then there’s no time to think of the garden. What I chiefly fear is that she’ll get married to some young fellow, who’ll be stingy and will let the garden to some tradesman, and the whole place will go to the devil in the first year! In our business women are the scourge of God!
I take offense; I who start grapevines from snips of wood, cut thousands of peaches into desserts, turned stubborn raspberries into wine, make sauce, jelly and wine from the crabapples other people rake up and throw away, coaxed the rocklike quince into jewels of jelly.
Scourge of God indeed!
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology