concept
Korobochka and Kukshina
Korobochka / Kukshina
also: Коробочка, Кукшина
Korobochka (a fussy, small-minded landowner in Gogol's Dead Souls) and Kukshina (a shallow self-styled emancipated woman in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons) are cited as the comic literary ancestresses of the "Petersburg ladies" mocked in the service-record squib.
Reading notes
- To A. I. Smagin, 11 December 1891. Moscow. §5 or should some Korobochka or other bequeath a ruble to the same end
\textbf{Коробочка} -- Korobochka, the fussy, hoarding provincial landowner from Gogol's \textit{Dead Souls} (part I, chapters 3-4), invoked here generically as a byword for a stingy or small-minded old woman of means; Chekhov imagines even such a miserly type being moved to leave a token ruble to the famine-relief fund.