Charles Darwin

Reading notes

• Who Is to Blame? §11 see Darwin

  A mock-scientific aside: the narrator solemnly credits the kitten's imagined bloodthirsty ancestry to inherited traits from her "forebears the tigers," citing Darwin's theory of evolution as if writing a zoological treatise about a half-grown household kitten -- the joke being the mismatch between the grandiose citation and the trivial (and, as the story shows, false) claim it supports.

• At a Magnetism Séance §14 Darwin

  Charles Darwin (1809-1882), whose theory of inherited traits is invoked here as a comic pseudo-scientific justification for the narrator's claim to have inherited his doctor father's tactile gift for identifying banknotes by touch.

• To V. V. Bilibin, 11 March 1886. Moscow. §12 I am reading Darwin

  Chekhov, trained as a physician, read Darwin's work with real enthusiasm rather than as passing pop-science color; his letters and stories of the mid-1880s show a recurring interest in evolutionary ideas, here expressed with uncomplicated delight ("What luxury!").

• To Al. P. Chekhov, February 1883. Moscow. §10 Darwin

  Charles Darwin, invoked as the marker of fashionable modern learning that Zembulatov lacks -- Anton refuses to hold the gap against him.

• To Al. P. Chekhov, 17–18 April 1883. Moscow. §11 Darwin's methods

  Charles Darwin, whose comparative, evidence-gathering method Chekhov claims (mock-admiringly) to be borrowing for his invented project.