2 As a converted Jew, Sarra had to take a Christian saint’s name and patronymic.
3 Zemstvo, an elective council created in 1864 to administer minor regional economic, educational and sanitary matters; its elected members included both landowners and peasants. Throughout the 1880s, a period of political repression, the zemstvos worked sluggishly.
4 “Good grief, all one had to do was pronounce these words for a Russian intellectual, a university student, a coed to make a respectful face. Once a country doctor came on stage, the audience’s sympathy was enlisted, he was the ‘shining light,’ the ‘social idealist,’ he has the right to be the ‘positive’ character in the play.
“And suddenly this hero . . . is left alone and says: ‘What the hell! It’s bad enough they don’t pay me for my visits . . . etc.’ So: one stroke, just one lie, and the mask is off” (V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, Out of the Past [1938]). See end of Act One.
5 Guberniya, a provincial region administered by a governor and divided into counties (uyezdy).
6 His government salary as Permanent Member of the Council for Peasant Affairs.
7 An in-joke for the play’s first audiences. Nicolas-voilà (French: It’s Nick in the nick o’ time!) was a tagline from a song in a musical farce popularized by the actor Davydov, who created the role of Ivanov.
8 Chewing perfumed paper to sweeten the breath, and taking ammonia to cure a hangover.
9 Russian: merlekhlyundiya, Chekhov’s joking version of melancholy, which he picked up from medical school slang. Masha repeats it in Three Sisters.
10 German: Come here.
11 Shabelsky cites literary heroines at random. Madame Angot, a French market-woman of the French Directoire period, renowned for her salty speech, is a character in Charles Lecocq’s comic opera La Fille de Madame Angot (1872), which Chekhov may have seen in Moscow in 1878. Ophelia is Polonius’s daughter, once loved by Hamlet.
12 Chekhov later puts this song in the mouth of Yepikhodov in The Cherry Orchard.
13 Lishnye lyudi, usually translated as “superfluous men,” a technical term in Russian culture, popularized by Ivan Turgenev: well-born, well-educated members of society who fail to contribute anything to it. Ivanov applies the term to himself in Act Two.
14 Broken French: Who on earth is this Marfusha?
15 Literally, swine in a skullcap. Both this phrase and mauvais ton (bad form) are allusions to a letter defaming the town’s officials in the last act of Gogol’s comedy The Inspector General (1836).
16 The religious hypocrite in Molière’s comedy Tartuffe, or The Imposter (1664–1667).
17 A quotation from a folksong.
18 Yiddish: alas . . . woe is me . . . bad luck . . .
19 On Russian country estates watchmen would make the rounds, tapping on a board to warn intruders of their presence. Also see The Seagull, Act Four, and Uncle Vanya, Act Two.
20 Furniture in manor houses was kept under dustcovers when a room was unused or the family was away. It is a sign of Zinaida Savishna’s niggardliness that it should remain covered during a party.
21 The game being played is whist (Russian, vint), closely related to bridge. Each player holds thirteen cards.
22 Russians of limited means made a run on the 5-percent interest-bearing lottery tickets issued by the stock exchange in 1864 and 1866; in 1887, the price was raised and stabilized at a hundred rubles a ticket.
23 To lead is to play the first card or play one’s suit. A trick are the four cards played in each round. A slam is obtaining all thirteen tricks in one hand. A trump is the last card dealt out—the turn-up. To call for a trump is to signal one’s partner to lead trumps.
24 Since compliments might attract envy and, hence, the evil eye, bad luck was averted by spitting three times over one’s shoulder.
25 A gesture meaning “Let’s get drunk.”
26 Zinaida Savishna uses the abusive term zhidovka (female kike or yid).
27 Anti-Semitic prejudice held that garlic was a favorite food of Jews and that they stank of it.
28 Lines from Lermontov’s poem “No, ’tis not thee I love so warmly” (1841), which was set to music by at least three composers.
29 A line from Gogol’s Dead Souls: the blustering Nozdryov says it to Chichikov, when they are playing checkers for a stake of the former’s dead serfs.
30 Ancient Greek god of medicine; in this Latin form, a fanciful term for a physician.
31 Yiddish: business deal, with the connotation of swindle.
32 Fireworks used for signaling.
33 The opening line of a gypsy ballad based on a poem by V. I. Krasov. Chekhov also puts this song into the mouth of Dr. Dorn in The Seagull.
34 Mispronunciation of “je vous prie,” “please.”
35 French: custard, spider, thanks a lot.
36 In 1887, Germany’s militarism provoked a strain in its relations with France, and war nearly broke out three times in the course of that year.
37 Louis Pasteur, the French bacteriologist (1822–1895) was in the news; his Institut Pasteur, whose aim was to treat hydrophobia by inoculation, opened in Paris in 1888.
38 A line from Denis Davydov’s Songs of an Old Hussar (1817), the poetic diary of a versifying army officer.
39 Latin: Do it again!
40 Bad French: pockets.
41 Paraphrase of a line from “The Doctor Serenade” by W. Ch. Dawinhof (words by A. M. Ushakova).
42 Allopathy is curing a disease by inducing a different kind of disease; homeopathy is treating a disease by minute doses of drugs that would induce disease-like symptoms in a healthy person.
43 Sonya repeats this line to Astrov in Uncle Vanya, Act Two.
44 In Russian, Lebedev twists the proverb “A shriven head escapes the axe” (A fault confessed is half redressed) to “A shriven head gets a work-over by the wife though it may escape the axe.”
45 Elementary schools fell under the jurisdiction of the Rural Board, of which Lebedev is chairman.
46 The pseudonym of Aurore Dudevant (1804–1876), whose overwrought and liberal-minded romantic novels were highly popular in Russia: Turgenev called her “one of our saints,” Belinsky “a modern Joan of Arc.”
47 From E. S. Shashina’s ballad “Three Words” (text by O. P. Pavlova).
48 Spanish: correctly de los majores, of the best.
49 French: you understand?
50 A bank in the southern county town of Skopin in Ryazan failed in 1884 and was a topic of conversation for years. Chekhov reported on the Moscow trial of the bank’s president and head cashier.
51 At the start of Gogol’s comedy The Inspector General, the worried Mayor tells of a dream in which two rats of “exceptional size” came, sniffed around, and then went away again.
52 In Russian Orthodox wedding ceremonies, the benediction is given before the church ceremony takes place.
53 The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was lodged in the popular imagination as a paragon of systematic pessimism.
54 At traditional Russian weddings, the cry “Bitter! Bitter!” is meant for the bride and groom to kiss and thus “sweeten things up.”
55 A folksong connected with the wedding ritual, sung by the bridesmaids to the bride the day before the ceremony, at the bridal shower.