person
Monsieur Boiseau (Jacques)
Boiseau
also: Буазо, m-r Буазо, Jacques, Жак, m-r Boiseau
Nadezhda Osipovna's French husband, a commission agent freshly returned from Paris the same rainy night Zhirkov comes calling; a stock comic Frenchman who speaks Russian with a heavy phonetic accent, drinks morosely, complains of mosquitoes, and unwittingly hosts his wife's lover for half the night without any idea who he is.
Reading notes
- An Unpleasant Business §20 Boiseau
"Буазо" (Boiseau) is presented as a French surname; Zhirkov knows only that Nadezhda Osipovna's husband is French by birth and works in the commission trade (комиссионерство), i.e. as a middleman/agent handling goods or transactions on commission -- a common, unglamorous line of business for a foreigner resident in Russia.
- An Unpleasant Business §30 "Who is dere?"
Boiseau's dialogue is rendered throughout in a heavy phonetic accent in the Russian original -- "Кто издесь?" for "Кто здесь?", "Чегт возми" for "Чёрт возьми", "карьошо" for "хорошо", and so on -- a period stock convention in Russian comic writing for mocking a foreigner's imperfect Russian, used here (and elsewhere in Chekhov's early comic sketches) to mark Boiseau as a farcical type rather than to render him with any linguistic accuracy. The English translation renders this with an analogous broken-English accent ("dere," "nossing," "karasho" for the Russian-inflected "хорошо") because the mangled speech is structurally part of the joke -- Boiseau's inability to speak the language he lives in mirrors his inability to notice the lover standing in his own front hall -- and flattening it into fluent English would erase a real comic device of the original rather than merely softening it. This is a period convention, not an endorsement of it, and the note is offered as context rather than apology.
- An Unpleasant Business §47 Karasho
Boiseau's "карьошо" is his accented rendering of "хорошо" ("good," "all right"), used here as a verbal tic throughout his dialogue (see also loc 55) -- part of the same broken-Russian-turned-broken-English comic convention discussed at loc 30.
- An Unpleasant Business §62 leaden eyes
"Оловянными глазами" (leaden/tin-colored eyes) -- a stock Chekhovian description for a dull, glassy, half-drunk stare; here it marks Boiseau's wine-soaked incomprehension as he looks blankly at the guest in his own house without the faintest suspicion of who he is.