Ecclesiastical Consistory

Reading notes

• A Nightmare §86 я еще в консисторию за место свое не всё еще выплатил. За место с меня двести рублей положили

  Father Yakov's confession that he is still paying off two hundred roubles to the consistory 'for his position' points to the real, semi-institutionalized practice by which a diocesan consistory could impose a fee -- often informally, sometimes construed as support for a predecessor or a diocesan fund -- on a newly appointed priest, paid off in installments from his own meager salary; this single debt already consumes half of his entire recorded annual income of 150 roubles.

• Not Corruptive Thoughts §2 ecclesiastical consistories

  The administrative and judicial office of an Orthodox diocese; a stock target of Chekhov's satire on venal, self-serving clerks.

• List of Exhibitors Awarded Cast-Iron Medals in the Russian Section at the Amsterdam Exhibition §3 Consistory officials

  Clerks of a diocesan consistory, the Orthodox Church's administrative and judicial office, popularly associated with venality and slow, self-interested paperwork.

• At the Baths §179 ecclesiastical department

  Work in the diocesan consistory administration -- Bryuzdenko's employer -- popularly associated in satire with venal, paperwork-bound clerks; Dasha's excuse that it is "the same as the quartermaster corps" is the joke.

• At the Barber's §4 consistory

  The administrative office of an Orthodox diocese; Yagodov's old job as a watchman there marks him as a minor, unlettered functionary now fallen to manual trade.

• The Witch §69 поехали в консисторию

  Raisa's dying father traveled to the diocesan consistory to arrange, through its administrative machinery, that an unmarried sexton be sent as her husband so the family's claim on the post would not lapse -- the marriage's origin as an ecclesiastical-bureaucratic transaction rather than a courtship.