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Posrednik
also: Посредник, The Intermediary
A publishing house founded with Tolstoy's help to produce cheap, morally improving booklets -- folk tales, retellings of Western literature, popular science, simplified classics -- for the Russian peasantry, edited by Ivan Gorbunov-Posadov and administratively tied to Vladimir Chertkov's Tolstoyan circle.
Reading notes
- To I. I. Gorbunov-Posadov, 4 September 1891. Moscow. §4 The Tolstoy and Leskov pieces are especially good.
Posrednik commissioned and reprinted short, morally exemplary or folk-adjacent fiction from established writers -- including Tolstoy himself and Nikolai Leskov -- for its cheap peasant-market booklets; Chekhov singles these out as the strongest items in the parcel.
- To V. G. Chertkov, 2 May 1891. Moscow. §5 "Posrednik's" service
Posrednik ("The Intermediary"), the Tolstoy-founded publishing house producing cheap, morally improving booklets for the Russian peasantry, edited by Gorbunov-Posadov and administratively tied to Chertkov's circle. Chekhov's letter is his first formal reply to its overture, written the very day he returned to Moscow from two months touring Western Europe.
- To I. I. Gorbunov-Posadov, 18 July 1891. Bogimovo. §6 From the catalogue you sent I have chosen NoNo 96, 40, 106, 23, 53, 99, 107, 64, 56, 25, 79, 508, 509, 503, and 507.
The catalogue is a Posrednik booklist; the numbers cite specific items by their list position only and are not further identified in the source, so no individual apparatus entries are made for them.