person
Count Platov
also: граф Платов, Graf Platov
A member of the noble Platov family (descendants of the celebrated Don Cossack ataman Matvei Platov), whose estate in the Don region the teenage Chekhov visited on a boyhood trip; the estate's steward, also named Bilibin, is the occasion for Chekhov's anecdote to his correspondent V. V. Bilibin about a schoolboy prank and a steppe fire.
Reading notes
- To V. V. Bilibin, 11 March 1886. Moscow. §13 Count Platov
The Platov family were prominent Don Cossack nobility, descended from the celebrated ataman Matvei Platov (1751-1818), hero of the Napoleonic Wars; Chekhov's schoolboy visit to a Platov estate in the Don region, and the estate steward's coincidental surname, prompts this entire boyhood anecdote as a play on his correspondent's own surname.
- To Al. P. Chekhov, 5 April 1888. Moscow. §8 Count Platov
A stock comic signature/nickname Chekhov sometimes appended to letters, unrelated to the historical Cossack general of the same name; here it stands in place of an ordinary sign-off.
- To Al. P. Chekhov, 11–12 April 1888. Moscow. §16 Count Platov
The same stock comic sign-off Chekhov uses elsewhere in letters to Alexander, standing in for an ordinary signature.
- To A. S. Suvorin, 29 August 1888. Sumy. §5 Count Platov's
Chekhov recalls a childhood memory of sitting by a steam engine on the Don-region estate of the Platov family (descendants of the Cossack ataman Matvei Platov) while staying with his grandfather, tallying threshed grain -- the source of the vivid sensory description of the steam thresher that follows.