[55] The last two sentences were deleted by censors in both Soviet editions.
[56] Olga Kundasova.
[57] Vladimir Chertkov, Tolstoy's principal disciple and apostle.
[58] Reference to a recently published story by Ivan Shcheglov.
[59] The ethnographer Nikolai Astyryov. He published an expose of inhuman conditions in the mining industry in the Transbaikalia region, for which it was rumored he might be put on trial.
[60] The annotators of both Soviet editions of Chekov's letters become what
can only be described as hysterical at this point, insisting that there were never any such things as cholera rebellions in nineteenth-century Russia, that peasant uprisings caused by political and economic conditions were
[62] Ilya Repin and Ivan Shishkin were two highly admired academic painters of Chekhov's time. Their reputations dwindled during the artistic renaissance of the early twentieth century, but the aesthetics of socialist realism has reinstated them in more recent decades as giants of nineteenth- century painting, at least in the Soviet Union. In the Soviet film based on Chekhov's "The Grasshopper," the screen play emphasized the moral contrast between the virtuous doctor-husband (played by Sergei Bondarchuk) and the irresponsible painter-lover by making the husband (he was pointedly indifferent to the arts in Chekhov's original story) an admirer of Repin and the lover (an academic painter in Chekhov) a decadent, modernist denigrator of Repin.
[63] Admiral Avelan was in command of the Russian fleet that visited France when an alliance was concluded between the two countries. Russian newspapers published detailed reports of receptions and dinners given in France in Avelan's honor. Chekhov was nicknamed after him because of his own almost equally strenuous social life during this period.
[64] The novel Doctor Pascal by Emile Zola.
[65] This cat is a mere figure of speech. With all of Chekhov's tremendous
[66] In February of 1894 Chekhov's coughing became unbearable. He refused to recognize it as a symptom of tuberculosis, assuming that it was a bad case of bronchitis. Being a physician himself he did not seek outside medical help; instead he decided to spend a month in the warmer climate of the Crimea as a cure for his cough.
[67] Antonina Abarinova, a well-known operatic contralto of the 1860s and '70s, who became a dramatic actress when her operatic career was finished. She later played the role of Polina in the original production of The Seagull.
[68] The high point of the impact of Tolstoy's moral philosophy on Chekhov
[69] Dr. Nikolai Korobov.
[70] Chekhov worked on The Island of Sakhalin from 1890 to 1894. He was dissatisfied with an early draft, which he showed to Suvorin, and started
a new version early in 1893. "Forget what I've shown you, for it is all false," he wrote to Suvorin on July 28, 1893. "I kept writing and kept feeling I was on the wrong track, until I finally discovered where the false note was. It was in my trying to teach something to someone with my Sakhalin and at the same time trying to conceal something and to hold myself back. But as soon
as I started to admit what an oddball I felt like while I was on Sakhalin and what swine live there, things became easy and my work surged ahead, even though it is ending up a bit on the humorous side."
[73] Would it be possible to get an advance out of ShubinskyS for the articles? [Chekhov's own footnote].
[74] Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916) is remembered today primarily as a writer of historical romances dealing with either ancient Rome (Quo Vadis?) or the history of his native Poland (With Fire and Sword, The Deluge, etc.). In Chekhov's time he was also admired for his two novels of contemporary Polish life, The Polaniecki Family (translated into English as The Irony of Life and also as The Children of the Soil) and Without Dogma. Vukol Lavrov, the publisher of Russian Thought, was Sienkiewicz's principal translator and popularizer in Russia.
[75] Chekhov was somewhat kinder to Sienkiewicz's other contemporary
novel, Without Dogma, of which he wrote to Vukol Lavrov on November 13,
[77] Lydia Veselitskaya (1857-1936) was a popular writer of books for juveniles, which she published under the pen name V. Mikulich. Her best- known nonjuvenile work was a trilogy of satirical novels about a giddy society girl named Mimochka. In the course of her life she had interesting encounters with Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Leskov and she wrote valuable memoirs about each of them. She and Chekhov were not acquainted personally. Chekhov's letter to her is one of about half a dozen similar ones he wrote to various literary figures (Viktor Bilibin and Yelena Shavrova were two of them) who had gotten in touch with him to tell him they considered The Seagull a remarkable achievement and to urge him to disregard the unjust verdict of the opening-night audience and the St. Petersburg press.
[78] Ivan Gorbunov-Posadov.
[79] Chekhov was deeply involved in census taking at the time.
[80] Dr. Vladimir Khavkin was a Russian bacteriologist and a disciple of Louis Pasteur. In 1897, he was testing a vaccine against the bubonic plague in Bombay.
[81] Alexei Kolomnin had sent Chekhov an elegant clock in a leather case, and it had arrived smashed. Pavel Boure was the best-known watchmaker in Moscow.
[82] Dr. Vladimir Yakovenko (1857-1923) was a noted Russian psychiatrist. At the Sixth Congress of the Russian Medical Association he was elected to head a committee charged with collecting evidence in support of a petition to the government to abolish corporal punishment in prisons. Accordingly, Yakovenko and a colleague published a letter to the editor in the January issue of The Physician asking the readers of that journal to supply