person
The Pigots
the Pigots
also: Пиготы
An obscure plural nickname in the closing lines of a letter to A. I. Smagin ("The Pigots sit at the windows the whole day long. But Semashko, since Your departure, has still not once seen them naked"). The referent is not established by the letter itself and no external identification has been found: the phrasing (sitting at windows, being seen "naked") is consistent with a household nickname for people, but could equally be pets or another private joke between Chekhov and Smagin. Predates the Chekhov family's famous Melikhovo dachshunds (acquired 1893, after this November 1891 letter), so it is not that pair. Left genuinely unresolved pending further research rather than guessed at.
Reading notes
- To A. I. Smagin, 21 November 1891. Moscow. §20 The Pigots sit at the windows the whole day long
"Пиготы по целым дням сидят у окон" -- an obscure plural proper noun/nickname (capitalized in the source, so evidently a name of some kind) whose referent this letter does not establish. Research for this edition found no scholarly identification of "Пиготы" in the standard annotated correspondence; the timing rules out the Chekhov family's celebrated Melikhovo dachshunds (Brom and Khina), who did not arrive until 1893, two years after this letter and before the family had even purchased Melikhovo. The following sentence -- "But Semashko, since Your departure, has still not once seen them naked" -- implies the Pigots are capable of being seen "naked" or not, which reads most naturally as a joke about people (undressed) or possibly caged/kept animals (unfeathered, unfurred), but the letter supplies no further clue. Transliterated as "the Pigots" and flagged here as genuinely unresolved rather than assigned a confident identification; a fuller original-language scholarly apparatus (e.g. the Soviet Academy 30-volume edition's letter notes) may eventually settle this, but no such note was located for this edition.