person
Father Irakly
also: отец Ираклий, Ираклий, Irakly
A Buryat Orthodox missionary priest from Sakhalin who traveled home with Chekhov in December 1890 and was briefly taken in by the Chekhov family in Moscow; born in Transbaikalia, he spent his whole life on Sakhalin converting others to Christianity and had himself converted from what Mikhail Chekhov's letter calls "heathendom" (язычество), a description the corpus renders without softening per house style. He had never been to European Russia before this trip.
Reading notes
- To I. P. Chekhov, 10 December 1890. Moscow. §4 широкомордый бурят из Сахалина... Бурят отец Ираклий
A Buryat missionary priest traveling with Chekhov from Sakhalin, taken in by the Chekhov household in Moscow immediately on arrival. Mikhail's description of him is rendered here at full force, without softening, per house translation policy: he calls him a "heathen" (язычник) by origin, notes with evident surprise that this "former heathen" both converts others to Christianity and was himself converted from "heathendom," and remarks that it is "terribly strange" (ужасно странно) to see such a man. This is the period's casual, othering religious-ethnic framing of a non-Russian, non-Orthodox-born clergyman -- language that reduces Irakly's own faith and vocation to a curiosity for the benefit of Mikhail's reader, even as it registers real personal warmth ("a most interesting character") and hospitality (he is housed with the family, not merely glimpsed). The glossary records this plainly rather than euphemizing either the Russian term or Mikhail's tone: "язычник" is the ordinary Russian word for "pagan/heathen," carrying the same charge in 1890 that it carries in English, and Mikhail's repeated framing ("a former heathen," "terribly strange") is his own, not the translator's gloss.
- To M. P. Chekhova, 16 January 1891. Petersburg. §8 Father Iraklii
A Buryat Orthodox missionary priest from Sakhalin who had traveled to European Russia with Chekhov the previous month and was briefly taken in by the Chekhov family in Moscow; his call here, evidently now also passing through or residing in Petersburg, continues that acquaintance. The same figure recurs in Chekhov's letter of two days earlier to his sister, where his arrival is likewise noted in passing.