57 Chekhov was the friend and admirer of the landscape painter Isaak Levitan, who tried to commit suicide in October 1895.
58 Agamemnon, leader of the Greek host in the Trojan war, was more familiar to Chekhov from Offenbach’s comic opera La Belle Hélène (1864) than from Homer’s Iliad.
59 Chekhov was against the indiscriminate use of notes in creative writing. “There’s no reason to write down similes, tidy character sketches, or details of landscapes: they should appear of their own accord, whenever needed. But a bare fact, an unusual name, a technical term ought to be put down in a notebook; otherwise it will go astray and get lost.”
60 Vasily Kachalov wrote:
“Look, you know,” Chekhov began, seeing how persistent I was, “when he, Trigorin, drinks vodka with Masha, I would definitely do it like this, definitely.”
And with that he got up, adjusted his waistcoat, and awkwardly wheezed a couple of times.
“There you are, you know, I would definitely do it like that. When you’ve been sitting a long time, you always want to do that sort of thing . . .”
(Shipovnik Almanac 23 [1914])
61 The verb form in Russian makes it clear that he failed.
62 A common formula in police reports applied to vagrants without passports.
63 The decoration is an appurtenance of his status as an Actual State Councillor.
64 In the original, the new zemstvo building. See Ivanov, First Version, note 3.
65 Literally, this gudgeon’s life (peskarnaya zhizn), a reference to Saltykov-Shchedrin’s fable “The Wise Gudgeon,” which deplores a conservative, philistine way of life.
66 The classical Greek riddle the Sphinx offers Oedipus. The answer is man.
67 The official Imperial theaters in St. Petersburg and Moscow.
68 This phrase was excised by the censor and replaced by Chekhov with “why does that man have to come between us?”
69 These two lines were excised by the censor and replaced with “He’ll go right now. I will ask him to leave here myself.”
70 This line was excised by the censor.
71 Nemirovich-Danchenko wrote:
While Chekhov was writing this play, the editors of Russian Thought sent him a bracelet charm in the shape of a book, on one side of which was engraved the title of his short story collection and on the other the numbers: p. 247, 1. 6 and 7. The gift was anonymous. In his collection Anton Pavlovich read: “You are the most generous, the noblest of men. I am eternally grateful to you. If you ever need my life come and take it.” It is from the story “Neighbors” (1892), in which Grigory Vlasich says these words to his wife’s brother. Anton Pavlo vich vaguely surmised who had sent him this charm, and thought up an original way to send thanks and a reply: he had Nina give the same medallion to Trigorin and only changed the name of the book and the numbers. The answer arrived as intended at the first performance of The Seagull. The actors, of course, never suspected that, as they performed the play, they were simultaneously acting as letter-carriers.”
(Out of the Past [1938])
72 Finiam, literally, incense; figuratively, gross flattery.
73 Actors invented by Chekhov. The Great Mail Robbery is F. A. Burdin’s adaptation of the French melodrama Le courrier de Lyon (1850), by Eugène Lemoine-Moreau, Paul Siraudin, and Alfred Delacour, well known to Victorian English audiences as The Lyons Mail. As an adolescent in Taganrog, Chekhov had seen and loved this play.
74 Slavyansky Bazar, an elegant and fashionable hotel in central Moscow, rated one of the top three and much frequented by Chekhov. It was where Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko held their epic lunch that resulted in the founding of the Moscow Art Theatre. Molchanovka is a street near Arbat Square in Moscow, in the center of the city, easy walking distance from the Slav Bazaar.
75 See Ivanov, First Version, note 19.
76 Beginning of a serenade by K. S. Shilovsky, popular at the time; its sheet music had gone through ten printings by 1882.
77 Chekhov may have been familiar with a series of comic monologues by the eccentric French writer Charles Cros, called L’Homme Qui, published between 1877 and 1882.
78 Dr. Dorn’s pleasure in fleeing the constraints of individual personality into multiple personality echoes Baudelaire: “The pleasure of being in crowds is a mysterious expression of the delight in the multiplication of numbers.”
79 Rusalka (The Naiad or Nixie), a fragment of a verse drama by Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837), written sometime between 1826 and 1832; the story of a poor miller’s daughter, seduced and abandoned by a prince. She drowns herself and turns into a water nymph, while her father goes mad and calls himself “the local raven.” The tale was turned into an opera by A. S. Dargomyzhsky.
80 Since there are no definite or indefinite articles in Russian, this could also be translated “she is the gull.”
81 Literally, “old Lovelace,” the voluptuary hero of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), whose sole purpose in life is to seduce the heroine. Its Russian version was hugely popular in the late eighteenth century, even among those who, like Tatyana’s mother in Yevgeny Onegin, didn’t read it. (“She loved Richardson / Not because she preferred Grandison to Lovelace; / But in the old days Princess Alina, / Her Moscow cousin, / Had often rambled on about them to her” [Act II, scene 30].) “Lovelace” gradually became a standard term for a philanderer.
82 A mysterious political prisoner under Louis XIV, whose face was hidden by an iron mask. He was first mentioned in the Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de Perse (Amsterdam, 1745–1746), where he was alleged to be Louis’s bastard. He is best known from Le Vicomte de Bragelonne (1848–1850), the third of Alexandre Dumas’s musketeer novels, in which he is supposed to be Louis’s twin.
83 An Italian import, known to Americans as Bingo, the game became fashionable in northern Russia in the 1840s and was briefly banned as a form of gambling. It was the common evening diversion on Chekhov’s farm at Melikhovo.
84 Chekhov used the same words in criticizing a story by Zhirkevich. “Nowadays ladies are the only writers who use ‘the poster proclaimed,’ ‘a face framed by hair.’”
85 Compare Chekhov’s story “The Wolf” (1886): “On the weir, drenched in moonlight, there was not a trace of shadow; in the middle the neck of a broken bottle shone like a star. The two millwheels, half sheltered in the shade of an outspread willow, looked angry and bad-tempered . . .” In a letter to his brother (May 10, 1886), he offers it as a facile technique.
86 In the original, talma. A quilted, knee-length cloak with a wide, turned-down collar and silk lining, named after the French tragedian François Joseph Talma.
87 The last sentence is slightly misquoted from the epilogue of Turgenev’s novel Rudin (1856).
88 Omut can also be translated as “millrace,” which would connect back to the Rusalka imagery. In Act Three of Uncle Vanya, it is translated as “millrace.”
89 The Des Moines of tsarist Russia, a rapidly growing provincial trade center in the Oryol guber-niya, south of Tula, noted for its grain elevators, tanneries, and brickyard, with a population of 52,000.