person
"Phylloxera"
Phylloxera
also: Филоксера
A joking nickname -- borrowed from the vine-louse pest notorious for devastating European vineyards in the 1870s-80s -- for an unnamed figure in Lyubov Gurevich's circle whom Chekhov credits with turning her against the critic Mikhailovsky ("she scolded Mikhailovsky, and I, seeing in this the influence of Phylloxera, praised him"). Not otherwise named or identified in this letter or elsewhere in the corpus as currently indexed; left genuinely unresolved rather than guessed at.
Reading notes
- To A. S. Suvorin, 26 November 1891. Moscow. §7 the influence of Phylloxera
"Филоксера" (Phylloxera) -- literally the vine louse, the aphid-like pest notorious for devastating European vineyards through the 1870s-80s -- used here as a joking, faintly barbed nickname for someone in Gurevich's circle whom Chekhov credits with turning her against the critic Mikhailovsky. The referent is not identified in the source or in this corpus: no other letter in the collection to date uses the name, and nothing in the immediate context narrows it to a known figure at "Severny Vestnik" (candidates one might guess at -- an editorial colleague, a critic in her circle -- are not named elsewhere in terms that would confirm the joke). This edition leaves the identification open rather than force a guess; flagged here as a genuinely unresolved nickname rather than a gap in research.
- To A. S. Suvorin, 3 December 1891. Moscow. §9 Filoxera
Reuses entity:phylloxera-unidentified, the joking nickname (borrowed from the vine-louse pest) for an unnamed figure in Gurevich's circle, first attested at. There Chekhov credits "Phylloxera" with a bad influence turning Gurevich against the critic Mikhailovsky; here the same nickname appears in a list of parties Gurevich owes money to ("the printing house needs it, paper needs it, the authors need it, Filoxera needs it"), consistent with a person close enough to her operation to be both an influence and a creditor. Still not otherwise identified.