person

Alexander Ivanovich Smagin

Smagin

also: A. I. Smagin

A neighboring landowner and acquaintance of the Chekhov family near Melikhovo, with whom Chekhov corresponded about farm and land matters in the early 1890s.

Reading notes

To N. M. Lintvareva, 14 December 1891. Moscow. §5 A. I. Smagin is already brokering some farmstead or other.
Alexander Ivanovich Smagin, the neighboring landowner already negotiating a khutor (small country property) purchase with the Chekhov family through the autumn of 1891; this letter shows the search still open and unresolved seven weeks after the comic ultimatum of, with Masha now also being sent to view properties near Lintvaryova's estate as a second track of the same search that will culminate the following March in the purchase of Melikhovo.
To A. I. Smagin, 26 January 1892. Moscow. §3 I did not understand one question in it: "Did you receive the assistance?"
Chekhov professes not to understand what "assistance" (\foreignlanguage{russian}{помощь}) Smagin's congratulatory telegram refers to; no other letter in the surviving run clarifies the reference, and it is left as one of the small unresolved particulars of this exchange -- possibly a garbled transmission, or a reference to some now-lost piece of correspondence between the two.