animal
Bobchinsky (horse)
Bobchinsky
also: Бобчинский
One of the magistrate's carriage horses, named -- as a small joke -- after Bobchinsky, the comic gossiping landowner of Gogol's The Government Inspector; mentioned only in the husband's offhand remark about rearranging the harness, in "The Examining Magistrate" (1887).
Reading notes
- The Examining Magistrate §7 Бобчинского
The husband has named one of his carriage horses Bobchinsky, after the comically inseparable gossip of the same name in Gogol's play The Government Inspector (1836) -- a small, throwaway joke about a harness change that has no bearing on the plot, typical of Chekhov's habit of dropping in a literary aside.