Privy Councillor

Reading notes

• From the Diary of an Assistant Bookkeeper §18 Privy Councillor

  The third grade in the imperial Table of Ranks, a very senior official addressed as "Your Excellency" -- the absurdity of such a dignitary swapping galoshes with the perpetually disgraced Kleshchev is the joke.

• The Wood Demon §46 widow of a Privy Councillor

  The third grade in the imperial Russian Table of Ranks, a very senior official addressed as "Your Excellency." Voynitskaya's late husband's rank marks the family as gentry of real standing, not simply provincial landowners.

• My Ranks and Titles §12 privy councillor

  Class III in the Table of Ranks, a senior official addressed as 'Your Excellency'; the narrator claims it because he takes 'private' (private) counsel with his wife, hidden from his mother-in-law.

• A Young Man §12 privy councillor

  Tayny sovetnik, the third of the Table of Ranks' fourteen civil grades, a senior civil-service rank entitling its holder to be addressed as 'Your Excellency'; Pravdolyubov glosses it here as equivalent to a lieutenant general in military rank.

• Office Notations §20 privy councillor

  The third grade in the imperial Russian Table of Ranks, a senior official's title invoked sarcastically here to belittle a lowly clerk's illegible signature.

• The Death of a Government Clerk §1 privy councillors

  'Тайный советник' (Privy Councillor), the third-highest civil rank in the Table of Ranks, equivalent to a lieutenant-general -- Chekhov's narrator invokes it to insist, ironically, that even the most exalted officials are subject to the ordinary indignity of sneezing.

• The Privy Councillor §1 a privy councillor

  Privy councillor (tayny sovetnik) was the third-highest civil grade in Peter the Great's Table of Ranks, equivalent to a lieutenant-general and addressed as "Your Excellency" -- a genuinely exalted rank for a provincial family's relative, which is why the news throws the household into such preparatory turmoil. The gap between that rank's imagined solemnity and Uncle Ivan's actual frivolity is the story's central comic engine.

• The Privy Councillor §23 Your Excellency

  "Vashe vysokoprevoskhoditelstvo" ("Your High Excellency") was the correct formal address for a privy councillor under the Table of Ranks; Pobedimsky's elaborate, theatrically over-prepared self-introduction using the full honorific is undercut when Uncle Ivan simply laughs and shakes his hand -- the studied formality having no target.

• Fat and Thin §11 privy councillor

  Third grade in the Table of Ranks, a very senior rank addressed as 'Your Excellency'; the 'two stars' are the breast-stars of high decorations confirming it.