Mariya Morisovna Abramova

Reading notes

• To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 14 September 1889. Moscow. §9 have managed to warm their hands at her purse

  "Нагреть руки" (to warm one's hands, i.e. to profit, often at another's expense or through sharp dealing) applied to writers who have gotten cash advances out of Abramova's theatrical enterprise; a mildly cynical idiom about opportunistic profiteering, rendered with its literal warming image intact.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 12 November 1889. Moscow. §4 Abramova

  Mariya Morisovna Abramova, the Moscow actress and theatrical manager already established elsewhere in this corpus (see, first attested); here she is negotiating to buy the play referenced earlier in this same section (\S4), on terms Chekhov calls advantageous to him.

• To A. S. Lazarev, 23 November 1889. Moscow. §4 Abramova theater

  The Moscow private theatrical company run by the actress Mariya Morisovna Abramova, active in the late 1880s -- one of two rival private companies (alongside Goreva's) Chekhov mentions elsewhere in the corpus.

• To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 12 December 1889. Moscow. §5 the office, before sending your translation on to Abramova,

  Mariya Morisovna Abramova, the actress who had run a short-lived private Moscow theater company; by the date of this letter she \emph{no longer} runs the theater (see next note), though the \emph{Artist} office's habitual practice was evidently still to route translations to her by name.