Andrei Andreevich Nyunin

Reading notes

• The Wedding §20 the grand rond

  "Гран-рон" (from French "grand rond," a circular formation figure in the quadrille) and "силь-ву-пле" ("s'il vous plaît") are Nyunin's affected scraps of ballroom-French dance vocabulary, part of the play's running joke about characters reaching for a polish -- French phrases, Latinate neologisms -- that sits awkwardly on their actual social standing.

• The Wedding §147 a real general, solid, elderly, eighty years old, perhaps, or even ninety

  Nyunin's breathless sales pitch to Nastasya Timofeevna already contains the seeds of the deception's unraveling: he is selling an old man's frailty and rank as though they were interchangeable virtues, and inflating Revunov-Karaulov's actual age (seventy-two, per loc. 189) for effect.

• The Wedding §149 a regular Boulanger

  "Буланже" invokes General Georges Boulanger, the flamboyant French general and would-be strongman politician whose brief, sensational popularity (the "Boulangist" movement) peaked in France around 1886-1889, making him an internationally topical byword for a dashing military man at exactly the time Chekhov was writing; Nyunin's comparison is absurdly overblown for the mild, elderly Revunov-Karaulov.

• The Wedding §176 patriarchal...loves proper deference to rank

  Nyunin's flattering description of the Zhigalov household as "patriarchal" and rank-deferential is the cover story he uses to talk the honest Revunov-Karaulov into accepting the false title "your excellency" -- reframing what is actually a paid deception as simply respecting an old-fashioned family's customs.

• The Wedding §265 such trifles

  Nyunin's brush-off of the twenty-five-ruble scandal as "trifles" not worth discussing, immediately after an old man has stormed out humiliated, is the play's final small cruelty: the party simply resumes its toasts (loc. 267) without pause, and Revunov-Karaulov's exit produces no lasting consequence for anyone at the table.