animal
Apel Apelich
also: Апель Апелич
A pet belonging to Nikolai Alexandrovich Leikin, addressed by Chekhov with a mock-formal patronymic and the honorific "His Excellency" -- in keeping with Leikin's known fondness for dachshunds -- invoked as one of the animals that would quail before the two mongooses Chekhov brought back from Ceylon.
Reading notes
- To N. A. Leikin, 27 December 1890. Moscow. §7 My regards to His Excellency Apel Apelich and the rest of the sons of bitches: Rogulka, the dachshunds, and that mongrel that runs about the yard and makes attempts on Rogulka
The closing comic roll call of the Leikin household menagerie: Apel Apelich, addressed with the same mock-formal patronymic and honorific "His Excellency" used in (10 December 1890, written just over two weeks earlier), heads a list that also includes Rogulka (\textit{cf.} \S7 here and, first attested in the corpus as early as in 1886, a longtime fixture of Chekhov's greetings to the Leikin household), an unspecified number of dachshunds (Leikin was a well-known dachshund fancier, also invoked in's \S4 as animals "even" quailing before Chekhov's mongooses), and an unnamed mongrel characterized purely by its habit of harassing Rogulka in the yard. The phrase "sons of bitches" (\foreignlanguage{russian}{"сукины сыны"}) is used here in its familiar, affectionate register applied to dogs, not as an insult to any person.