Rouble and Kopeck

Reading notes

• The Chemist's Wife §18 на пятнадцать копеек мятных лепешек

  Peppermint lozenges (myatnye lepeshki) sold loose by the kopeck's worth were an ordinary pharmacy-counter item, purchased here as the flimsiest of pretexts for the officers' visit -- and, in the story's final irony, the same fifteen kopecks' worth Obtyosov buys again from the husband himself before flinging them into the road.

• The Chemist's Wife §24 на десять копеек соды

  Soda water/baking soda sold by weight was another everyday pharmacy stock item; like the lozenges, it gives the officers a second flimsy pretext to linger and keep the chemist's wife talking.

• The Chemist's Wife §51 Двенадцать рублей сорок восемь копеек

  An improbably large and precise sum for lozenges, soda, seltzer, and a few glasses of bad wine -- the chemist's wife's long pause "moving her lips" before naming it plays on both her inexperience at the till and the story's running joke about pharmacy overcharging.

• The Lady of the Manor §30 A rouble

  The rouble was the basic unit of Russian currency, divided into 100 kopecks; a coachman's wages in the story run ten to fifteen roubles a month, so the single rouble tip is a small but real sum to the old man.

• The Lady of the Manor §54 silver roubles

  Tselkovye, colloquial for silver rouble coins -- Semyon's exaggerated guesses at what the lady might pay Stepan run the peasant imagination's idea of gentry wealth.

• The Lady of the Manor §172 kopeck

  The smallest common unit of Russian currency (1/100 rouble); Stepan's plea that his father and brother get 'not a kopeck' underscores how little he is willing to let them profit from his new position.

• Someone Else's Trouble §39 Twenty-one hundred rubles

  The rouble was the basic unit of Imperial Russian currency; the 2,100-ruble annual interest payment Mikhailov cannot meet is the precise, mundane sum behind the family's ruin -- and the sum Vyerochka later wishes she could simply hand over (loc. 41).

• A Long Tongue §3 twenty roubles a day

  A rouble was the standard unit of currency in Imperial Russia; twenty roubles a day for a shared hotel room was, per Natalya's own account, a comfortable middling rate for a fashionable Crimean resort, offered as evidence against the resort's reputation for expense.

• Ladies and Gentlemen, Townsfolk (Господа обыватели) §31 fifteen roubles

  The rouble, the basic unit of Imperial Russian currency, and its subdivision the kopeck; the fire chief pads his speech with invented figures to sound authoritative.

• The Chorus Girl §24 девятьсот рублей

  Nine hundred roubles is named as the precise sum needed to make the alleged embezzlement disappear -- a substantial amount (many times a clerk's annual salary in the 1880s), pitched by the wife as small enough for Pasha's jewelry to plausibly cover, dramatizing the wife's contempt for what she assumes are Pasha's ill-gotten riches.

• The Kulachye's Nest §69 quarter-ruble

  Pre-revolutionary Russian currency: 100 kopecks to the ruble. Kuzma's prices (a quarter-ruble for milk, thirty kopecks for a dozen eggs, five-kopeck footbridge tolls) sketch the petty commercial exploitation running through the story.

• At the Mill §59 двугривенный

  A dvugrivenny is a coin worth twenty kopecks (one-fifth of a rouble) -- the single small coin the miller finally, grudgingly presses on his mother after working the whole wad of notes and silver back into his purse, a deliberately stingy sum that closes the story on his miserliness.

• The Burbot §35 half-ruble

  A poltinnik, a fifty-kopeck coin (half a ruble) -- a plausible, modest tip for manual labor, floated here as an incentive to spur the barin's interest once he learns a burbot, not just any fish, is at stake.

• An Exceptional Man §9 how much will you take for your services

  The extended haggling over two versus three roubles (roughly a day or two's wages for many trades) is the story's engine: Kiryakov's insistence on a fixed contract in advance -- rather than the customary post-hoc gratitude payment -- marks him from the outset as a man who converts every relation into an accounted transaction.

• Subscriptions Now Open for 1882 §3 roubles

  The rouble, Imperial Russia's standard currency unit, given here as the (still enormous) domestic equivalent of the paper's Finnish-marked founding capital.

• The Poison §9 four hundred rubles

  Four hundred rubles was a substantial sum for a minor bank clerk of the period -- roughly a year or more of a junior clerk's salary -- which is precisely why Kadykin's 'gift' of an old, uncollected debt (rather than cash) proves so corrosive once Lysov begins to think of it as real money owed to him.

• The Poison §24 That sofa alone must be worth four hundred rubles

  Lysov's very first thought on entering the doctor's study is to price the furniture against the exact sum of the debt -- the four hundred rubles has already become his private unit of measurement for the world, well before he has spoken a word of business to the doctor.

• The Poison §49 all the rest is interest

  Klyabov's revelation that the original debt was only fifty rubles -- the remaining three hundred fifty being accumulated interest on an old, informal student loan -- reframes the writ of execution as a stale, ethically murky claim rather than a straightforward unpaid debt, undercutting Lysov's sense of righteous grievance.

• To V. V. Bilibin, 28 February 1886. Moscow. §10 12 kopecks a line

  A per-line piece rate was the standard way Russian newspapers paid contributors in this period; 12 kopecks a line from Suvorin's Novoye Vremya was, for a young writer transitioning out of the cheap humor weeklies, a markedly generous rate, which is why Chekhov returns to the figure twice more later in the letter (secs. 25-26) as proof of Suvorin's decency.

• Salon de Varietes §3 twenty kopecks to check your coat

  The ruble (100 kopecks) was the basic unit of Russian currency; the story's small admission and coat-check fees mark this as a cheap, downmarket establishment.

• Typhus §27 a ruble and a quarter

  Klimov's failure to haggle over the cab fare, though he still understands "the difference between numbers," is the story's first clear marker that his fever has begun to detach him from ordinary judgment and self-interest -- money has stopped mattering to him even though arithmetic has not.

• Misery §24 двугривенный

  A dvugrivenny is a coin worth twenty kopecks (one-fifth of a rouble), a small, unfair fare for carrying three passengers -- Iona's indifference to the low price ("a ruble or a five-kopeck piece, it is all the same to him now") signals how far his grief has driven ordinary self-interest from his mind.

• A Man I Know §2 рубль

  One ruble for a turquoise ring was a modest sum even by the standards of cheap goods -- enough to underscore how little the pawnshop yielded her and how far it was from covering a fashionable jacket, hat, or shoes.

• A Man I Know §8 25 рублей

  Twenty-five rubles was the sum Wanda originally planned to demand from Finkel -- a far more substantial ask than the one ruble she in fact ends up paying him for the tooth extraction, sharpening the story's central irony.