Institutka

Reading notes

• The Commotion §1 институтка

  A young woman freshly graduated from an institut blagorodnykh devits (Institute for Noble Maidens), a boarding school for girls of the gentry. The credential marked Mashenka as genteel but portionless -- exactly the kind of educated, well-bred young woman who had no choice but to enter service as a governess.

• To the Chekhovs, 21 June 1890. Amur pod Pokrovskoy. §5 Traveling with us from Irkutsk are some institute girls -- Russian faces, but plain.

  An institutka is a student or graduate of an institut blagorodnykh devits (Institute for Noble Maidens), a boarding school for daughters of the gentry -- genteel, formally educated young women, of the kind popularly associated with refined manners and looks. Chekhov's remark inverts that association with a flat, ungallant judgment on their appearance ("Russian faces, but plain"): a throwaway aside, not developed further, and translated here at full force per this corpus's no-softening policy -- it is not rendered as a gentler or more equivocal comment than the Russian actually makes. "Некрасивые" is a plain, ordinary Russian adjective for physical unattractiveness with no additional charge beyond the judgment itself; "plain" is its direct sense, not a euphemism chosen to take the edge off. The remark is characteristic of Chekhov's private-letter register with family, where he freely passed unfiltered, often unflattering judgments on people's looks that he would not have put into published work.