"Low-browed, broad-cheekboned Asiatics" -- genuine ethnic contempt

Reading notes

• To N. N. Obolonsky, 29 April 1890. Yekaterinburg. §7 low-browed, broad-cheekboned Asiatics, sprung from the mating of Ural pig-iron with a beluga sturgeon

  Translates "лобастых и скуластых азиятов, происшедших от совокупления уральского чугуна с белугой." This is a passage of real, unambiguous contempt for the population Chekhov is passing among on his way east, not a neutral ethnonym incidentally present in the sentence. "Азиятов" (an archaic/dialectal spelling of "азиатов," "Asians/Asiatics") is deployed here pointedly, stacked with overtly demeaning physical description ("low-browed, broad-cheekboned") and capped with a dehumanizing joke that derives the people themselves from the mating of a Ural iron foundry with a fish -- industrial slag and a sturgeon standing in for their ancestry. This is categorically different from the corpus's separate, unrelated китаец case (an unmarked Russian noun for "a Chinese person" carrying no built-in pejorative charge, translated to a neutral English equivalent): here the Russian register itself is contemptuous, so per the corpus's no-softening policy the passage is translated at full force -- "low-browed, broad-cheekboned Asiatics" and the pig-iron/sturgeon conceit are rendered plainly, not euphemized, cut, or hedged with a distancing gloss. Softening this passage would misrepresent Chekhov's actual word choice and blunt content that is not incidental color but the sentence's entire comic engine; presenting it factually, as this note does, is not an endorsement of the view. Compare the corpus's other documented genuine-prejudice passages:'s "жид" and's "хохол" (self-applied) and "еврейчиков"/"that sex" notes, all likewise translated at full force per the same policy.