Ma-Pa is Chekhov's sister Maria Pavlovna. Counterfeiter was the name of Maria Kiselyova's dog. The painter Isaak Levitan, a close friend of Chekhov's, was a frequent guest at Babkino.
The amateur playwright Olga Golokhvastova, a friend of the addressee.
Some forgettable literary lights of the time. Emile Gaboriau was a French writer of popular detective novels, Marlitt was a pen name of a German lady who wrote pulp fiction, and Pierre Bobo was the nickname of the prolific and facile Russian novelist Pyotr Boborykin.
Stanislav Okreyts was a rabidly anti-Semitic journalist and publisher, whom Chekhov satirized several times in humor magazines; Pince-nez was a pen name of Maria Kiselyova herself and Aloe that of Chekhov's brother Alexander.
St. Tatyana was the patron saint of Moscow University, designated as such by its founder Ivan Shuvalov in honor of his mother, whose name was Tatyana. The feast day of this saint was traditionally celebrated by all the loyal alumni of Moscow University (cf. also Letter 17).
I.e., Anton Chekhov's own name day.
This was Chekhov's nickname for the two surviving sisters of the painter and stage designer Alexander Yanov. Shortly after Chekhov began to practice medicine, Yanov's mother and three sisters all came down with typhus. Yanov, who was a classmate of Nikolai Chekhov's at the art school, was unable to pay a doctor and Anton Chekhov volunteered to look after the stricken family. Despite his efforts, the mother and one of the sisters died. According to Mikhail Chekhov, the experience of losing two patients so early in his medical practice prompted Anton Chekhov to reduce his medical activities to a minimum and to concentrate on literature. The two Yanov sisters whose lives he managed to save became good friends of the entire Chekhov family; an album on the cover of which one of them embroidered in gold thread the legend "In Remembrance of Saving Me from Typhus" is now on display at the Chekhov Museum in Yalta.
Reference to the story originally published in New Times as "The Sister," but subsequently renamed "Good People" by Chekhov.
The critic Leonid Obolensky managed within the same year (1886) to compare Chekhov favorably to Korolenko in a signed article in Russian
Wealth and to pan Chekhov's collection Varicolored Stories in an unsigned review he published in the Observer, which Chekhov mentions below.
The play by the addressee's father, Vladimir Begichev, which was called Firebird.
Chekhov's one-act play Calchas, also known as The Swan Song.
The addressee's husband.
Maria Kiselyova's children. Chekhov wrote some delightful nonsense poetry for the amusement of Sasha Kiselyova, whom he had for some reason nicknamed Vasilisa.
A "Journal of Travel and Adventure on Land and Sea," published in Moscow and popular with juvenile readers.
10. To Vladimir Korolenko1
Moscow, October 17, 1887
Many thanks, dear Vladimir Galaktionovich, for your book, which I have received and am now in the process of rereading. Since you already have my books, it looks as though I'll have to limit the present shipment to a thank-you note.
By the way—to keep the letter from being too short—I might tell you how glad I am to have gotten to know you. I say this sincerely and with all my heart. In the first place, I deeply respect and admire your talent; it is precious to me for many reasons. In the second place, I have the feeling that if you and I make it through another ten or twenty years, we will inevitably encounter further points of contact. Of all the currently prosperous Russian writers2 I'm the least serious and most frivolous. I am on probation. In the language of poetry: I loved my pure muse, but lacked the proper respect, betrayed her, and all too often led her into realms unbefitting her. But you are serious, strong and true. As you can see, there are a great many differences between us, but nonetheless, when I read your work, especially now that I've made your acquaintance, I get the feeling that we're not such strangers after all. I don't know if I'm right or not, but I'd like to think so.
Oh and by the way again, I've enclosed a clipping from the New Times. This Thoreau3 fellow, whom you'll find out about in the article, sounds quite promising, the first chapter at least, and I'll keep clipping him out and save him for you. He's got ideas and a certain freshness and originality about him, but he's hard to read. The architectonics and construction are impossible. He piles attractive and unattractive, slight and weighty ideas one on top of the other in such a way that they crowd each other out, squeeze the juice out of one another, and before you know it, they'll all be squealing from the crush.
I'll give you the Thoreau when you get to Moscow. In the meantime, good-bye and keep well.
Korsh will probably put on my play.4 If so, I'll let you know the date of the performance. It may coincide with the period of your stay here. I hope you'll do me the honor if it does.
Yours, A. Chekhov
Like Chekhov, Vladimir Korolenko (1853-1921) made his literary debut in 1879. Of all the writers of the "generation of the eighties" whom Chekhov considered to be his contemporaries and with whom he corresponded, Korolenko is the only one whose work is still remembered, reprinted and read. Unlike Chekhov, Korolenko was a political activist by temperament, and both his life and his writings were largely devoted to organized political protest and to efforts to secure a greater degree of freedom for the Russian people. He lived long enough to see the Revolution for which he had been waiting all his life and to witness the abrogation of the very rights and freedoms which this Revolution was meant to achieve. His writings of 1919— 1921, which are never reprinted in the Soviet Union (in contrast to the rest of his work, which is regularly reissued), vehemently express the revulsion of the old freedom fighter against the betrayal and perversion of the ideals to which he had devoted his life.
There was no real spiritual affinity between Chekhov and Korolenko, as is witnessed by Korolenko's qualification of Ivanov as a "socially harmful play," his failure to understand The Cherry Orchard and his oddly colorless memoir about Chekhov. But there was a great deal of mutual sympathy and warmth, which continued for many years even in the absence of much personal contact. After a few friendly encounters in the late 1880s, the two writers lost contact until their joint resignation from the Academy over the cancellation of Maxim Gorky's election in 1902 (see Letters 153, 154 and 158).
The wording here seems to paraphrase the title of Nikolai Kushchevsky's political novel Nikolai Negorev, or the Prosperous Russian (1871).
In 1887, a Russian translation of Henry David Thoreau's Waldeny or Life in the Woods was serialized in New Times. Annotating this passage in his edition of fragments from Chekhov's letters, Louis S. Friedland transcribed Thoreau's name from the Cyrillic as "Того," and, disregarding both grammar and logic, suggested that Chekhov probably had in mind Yevgenia Tur, a Russian lady novelist of the nineteenth century.
Ivanov.
SUCCESS AS A PLAYWRIGHT: ffIVANOV"
Anton Chekhov's earliest attempts to write plays go back to his school years in Taganrog. As a medical student in 1880-81, he wrote a sprawling, interminable monster of a play in which he managed to combine the more obvious situations and devices of nineteenth-century melodrama with some original departures which in retrospect seem to presage a number of themes and characters from his later mature plays. He took this play to the celebrated actress Maria Yermolova to ask her advice about the feasibility of its being produced. What she told him is not known, but whatever it was, it made Chekhov put the manuscript away in a file, where it was discovered in the 1920s. It is usually published (the manuscript lacked a title page) as either Play Without a Title or, after the name of the principal character, as Platonov. It has become in recent decades a favorite of adapters and abridgers, who are wont to give the results of their efforts their own titles, such as A Country Scandal or Don Juan in the Russian Manner, and then get them produced as a new play by Chekhov. In fact, whenever one hears of a play by Chekhov one cannot quite place, it is a sure sign that somebody else has tried to trim down his untitled 1881 play to manageable size. The manuscript young Chekhov once discarded is thus gradually becoming an inexhaustible source of new Chekhov plays.