concept
"Pharaoh's tribe" (epithet for Roma people)
Pharaoh's tribe
also: фараоново племя, faraonovo plemya
"Фараоново племя" (literally "Pharaoh's tribe/breed") was a common 19th-century Russian ethnic epithet for Roma people, rooted in the old European folk-etymological belief (also the ultimate source of the English word "Gypsy," from "Egyptian") that Roma originated in Egypt and were descended from the Pharaohs' court or army. By Chekhov's time the phrase functioned as a colorful, slightly archaic slang term rather than a neutral ethnonym, and Frolov spits it at the arriving Roma performers in the same contemptuous breath as his command to drink and sing -- part of the story's broader portrait of a rich man's casual cruelty toward everyone in his orbit. Preserved untranslated-in-spirit (rendered literally as "Pharaoh's tribe") to keep the period diction visible rather than substituting a modern, less loaded phrase; flagged here as a historical slur/epithet, not endorsed as accurate ethnography -- Roma people in fact originated in the Indian subcontinent, not Egypt.
Reading notes
- Drunk §56 Pharaoh's tribe
"Фараоново племя" ("Pharaoh's tribe/breed") was a common 19th-century Russian slang term for Roma people, deriving from the old European folk belief -- the same belief that gave English "Gypsy" from "Egyptian" -- that Roma originated in Egypt as descendants of the Pharaohs. Roma people in fact originated in the Indian subcontinent; the Egyptian-origin story is a historical misconception, not a fact. Frolov shouts the epithet at the Roma performers in the same breath as ordering them to drink and sing for his amusement, part of a night in which he treats every servant, entertainer, and hanger-on -- footmen, the ruined "engineer," the old singer, Mustafa, and now the Roma troupe -- with the same reflexive contempt he cannot direct at the actual source of his misery. The phrase is rendered here in a literal, period-accurate English translation ("Pharaoh's tribe") rather than replaced with a softer modern phrase, consistent with corpus practice of preserving historical slurs and epithets visibly, in character, so the reader can see exactly what is being said and by whom, rather than laundering the text's own class and ethnic contempt out of the translation.