person
Anisim Vasilyich
also: Анисим Васильич, Ан Васил(ьич)
A Taganrog acquaintance Chekhov is relieved to have avoided, since meeting him would mean being drawn into talk of politics; Chekhov jokes he would rather put "a bullet to the brow" than discuss politics with him.
Reading notes
- To the Chekhovs, 19 April 1887. Taganrog. §3 Да я же ж, господи, говорил же Ёре, иде я живу, да отчего же ж ви не приходили?
Chekhov renders Anisim Vasilich's speech in eye-dialect, reproducing its southern/Ukrainian-inflected features ("же ж" for emphatic "ведь/же," "иде" for "где," "ви" for "вы") -- the same accented pattern the letter has just labeled "kamburian" at loc. 2. The English keeps the run-on, breathless syntax and the visitor's habit of piling questions on top of each other without pausing for an answer, but does not attempt to reproduce the specific Russian dialect markers in English orthography, since there is no equivalent English dialect spelling that would carry the same connotations without introducing a different and misleading set of associations.
- To the Chekhovs, 19 April 1887. Taganrog. §4 the police carrion after me
"Полицейская стерва" -- literally "police carrion" or "police carcass" ("стерва," from the word for a dead animal's carcass, used colloquially as a coarse insult roughly equivalent to "bitch" or "vermin") -- is Chekhov's escalation from the milder "полицейская барабошка" ("police rattle/chatterbox") used of the same man, Anisim Vasilich, two sentences earlier at loc. 2. Both epithets target Anisim Vasilich's occupation ("police," i.e. some minor police-adjacent post or connection) rather than any ethnic or social category; the escalating contempt reflects Chekhov's mounting exasperation as the visitor pursues him from room to garden to a neighbor's house and back, not a documented or generalized slur against police officials as a class elsewhere in the corpus. Translated at full force, matching the coarseness of the Russian, rather than softened into a milder English equivalent.
- To G. M. Chekhov, 23 June 1887. Babkino. §6 Anisim Vasilyevich
A Taganrog acquaintance who had sent Chekhov a parcel; Chekhov promises to write to him but not before July, characteristic of his habitually deferred correspondence with the wider Taganrog circle.
- To G. M. Chekhov, 17 October 1887. Moscow. §13 Anisim Vasilyich
A Taganrog acquaintance elsewhere associated with tiresome political talk; here Chekhov simply asks for his address.