person
Dekonora
also: Деконора, Dekonora
Named alongside Artemenko as a tenant or comparison figure from whom Alexandra Vasilyevna reportedly took a "bra lig" (an obscure, unresolved phrase, flagged sic! in translation) for lodging at Luka; not otherwise identified. See the glossary note on "bra lig" for this letter.
Reading notes
- To Ye. M. Lintvareva, 6 September 1889. Moscow. §6 "Бра лиг с Деконора" / "a 'bra lig' (sic!) from Dekonora"
UNRESOLVED, flagged deliberately. The Russian source reads "Бра лиг с Деконора, берете с Артеменко" -- syntactically broken (no clear subject/verb agreement with what precedes: "Александре Васильевне передайте, что она поступила несправедливо, не взяв с меня ничего за маленький флигель. Бра лиг с Деконора, берете с Артеменко..."). "Бра лиг" is not standard Russian and does not resolve to any known idiom, rent term, or proper name across the available editions consulted for this letter. Candidate readings considered and rejected for lack of evidence: (a) a private household nickname or in-joke between Chekhov and the Lintvaryovs, now lost; (b) a garbled or OCR-corrupted fragment of the digitized source text (the phrase sits awkwardly enough to suggest transcription damage); (c) a dialectal or foreign-borrowed term for a fee or due. None can be confirmed. Per the translator's judgment, the phrase has been rendered literally as a transliterated "bra lig," marked (sic!) to flag it to the reader as anomalous in the source, rather than silently smoothed into a guessed English equivalent (e.g. "a fee" or "rent") that would falsely imply confidence in the resolution. This note documents the phrase as unresolved rather than force-resolving it.