Moisei Moiseich

The pale-faced, obsequious, nervously talkative Jewish keeper of a steppe posting inn in "The Steppe," who fusses over his travelers and pesters Kuzmichov to lease his estate. In this letter Chekhov recalls a real 1877 illness -- a night of peritonitis endured at a posting inn under a Moisei Moiseich's care -- that supplied a detail (and name) for the novella's innkeeper; the letter itself refers to the real-life nurse who tended him only as "the little Jew", while the character in the finished story bears this same name. A fictional character as it appears in the novella; the biographical original is not separately identified.