This was stated by Pskov archaeologists
During excavations in Pskov, scientists have discovered the largest treasure trove ever discovered in this area. According to experts, they could have gotten into their hands a part of the numismatic collection of the merchant Fyodor Plyushkin, who is considered the prototype of the hero of Nikolai Gogol's poem "Dead Souls" under the same name.
The treasure discovered in Muzeyniy Lane includes about 300 items, including coins-scales of Tver, Moscow, Novgorod and Pskov, coins from the time of Nicholas II, orders, medals and much more. To clearly illustrate how high the value of the discovered objects is, the head of the Pskov Archaeological Center, Tatyana Ershova, said that recently a coin, similar to several found in the treasure, was sold at an auction in Moscow in Moscow for two million rubles.
According to legend, the name of the merchant (or rather, his father) caught the eye of Alexander Pushkin, and it was he who suggested it to Nikolai Gogol, who was looking for a name for the character. After that, this surname in Russia became a household name and implied excessive and often irrational stinginess, and in some countries it even turned out to be a kind of medical term - “Plyushkin's syndrome” is sometimes called an excessive passion for hoarding.
However, considering Fyodor Plyushkin as a prototype of Gogol's character in the full sense of the word would be an obvious exaggeration - at the time of the first publication of the poem, the future merchant was only five years old. Nevertheless, the fate of the merchant and the “namesake” character sometimes intersected in a rather unusual way. For 40 years, the merchant has collected a collection that includes a wide variety of objects - coins, letters, weapons, works of art, books and much more. The collection consisted of about a million items, and, according to some estimates, it was the third largest in Russia and the eleventh in Europe. Nevertheless, many noted that the merchant did not keep any inventory of the collection, and often really valuable exhibits were adjacent to incomparably less significant ones.which is why the collection seemed to many to be provincial and "plushkin" in the sense of the word that it acquired thanks to the works of Gogol.
Dmitry Istrov
