Plyushkin

Plyushkin (Плю́шкин) was a character in the 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.

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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 as compulsive 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.