Little Russian

Reading notes

• Lights §119 an unserious French or Little Russian melodrama

  "Little Russian" (малороссийская) was the standard 19th-century Russian administrative and cultural term for Ukrainian; here Ananyev dismisses Kisochka's real distress by comparing it, contemptuously, to the stock exaggerated grief of cheap melodrama, specifically coding that melodrama as "French" or "Little Russian" -- theatrical genres and performance styles he associates with excess and unseriousness. See also loc 125-126 and loc 162, where Kisochka's actual voice and movements are repeatedly described with the same "Little Russian" association, this time admiringly, which underscores how much of Ananyev's response to her -- both the condescension here and the aesthetic appreciation there -- keeps her at the distance of a type rather than granting her interiority.

• Lights §125 that southern, faintly Little Russian accent

  Ananyev notes a trace of Ukrainian-inflected pronunciation in Kisochka's speech, consistent with the story's southern Black Sea setting near the linguistic border between Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking regions; he finds the accent lends her cry "Such a life!" "the character of a song," one of several places where he aestheticizes her grief even while failing to take its content seriously.

• Lights §126 a certain famous Little Russian actress

  Ananyev compares Kisochka's grief-stricken movements and sing-song delivery to the stage manner of an (unnamed) well-known Ukrainian actress of the period -- part of a pattern, continued at loc 162, in which he keeps experiencing her most genuine unhappiness primarily as a kind of performance to be admired rather than a plea to be answered.

• To Avgustin Vrzal, 14 August 1891. Bogimovo. §5 My grandfather was a Little Russian, a serf

  Renders "Дед мой был малоросс, крепостной" -- \textit{малоросс} ("maloross"), the period Russian ethnonym for a Ukrainian, from the imperial administrative name "Little Russia" (Malorossiya) for Ukraine. This edition keeps the period term "Little Russian" here rather than retrojecting the modern ethnonym "Ukrainian" onto Chekhov's own usage, consistent with the corpus's general practice of translating period ethnonyms as period ethnonyms rather than modernizing them (compare the neutral, non-slur use of the same root in "Ukrainian sausage" at, and the harsher adjectival use at ogni \S119, both discussed under/). Here the term is unmarked and matter-of-fact: Chekhov is simply stating an ethnic and biographical fact about his paternal grandfather, Yegor Mikhailovich Chekhov, a serf on the Chertkov estate in Voronezh province who purchased his family's freedom in 1841, two decades before the general Emancipation of 1861. Not a slur in this context (contrast, a harsher and more marked term for the same broad ethnic category), but a plain period-standard classification -- flagged here per the translator's note so a modern reader understands why the older ethnonym, rather than "Ukrainian," appears in this sentence.

• The Tragedian §10 Little Russian

  A period term for a Ukrainian, referring to the imperial-era administrative name 'Little Russia' for Ukraine; Fenogenov's ethnicity is later thrown at him as an insult in the police-captain's letter.