Nadezhda Mikhailovna Garshina

Reading notes

• To N. M. Lintvareva, 14 December 1891. Moscow. §8 I had Garshin's wife with me not long ago, the widow.

  The widow of the writer Vsevolod Garshin (d. 1888), referred to here only as "Garshin's wife, the widow" -- not otherwise named in the source, and distinct from the unrelated Moscow bookshop keeper "Garshina" who shares only the surname's root. Her visit to Chekhov, and the fact that she had known Zinaida Mikhailovna "while she was still well," links two separate strands of loss in this section -- Garshin's own death three years earlier and Zinaida Mikhailovna's now -- through a shared acquaintance who had witnessed both lives before illness or death overtook them.

• To N. M. Garshina, 27 December 1891. Petersburg. §3 Dear Nadezhda Mikhailovna, I have arrived in Petersburg.

  Nadezhda Mikhailovna Garshina, the widow of the writer Vsevolod Garshin, addressed here directly for the first time in the corpus; she had previously appeared only as a third-party mention -- "Garshin's wife with me not long ago, the widow" -- in Chekhov's letter to Natalya Mikhailovna Lintvaryova reporting her visit and her acquaintance with Lintvaryova's late sister Zinaida Mikhailovna. Chekhov opens with the bare fact of his arrival before turning, in the next section, to the practical errand he owed her.

• To N. M. Garshina, 10 January 1892. Moscow. §3 I was in a hurry to reach Moscow, where my domestic affairs were calling me, and so I did not manage to call on You.

  Chekhov apologizes for having left Petersburg without calling on Nadezhda Mikhailovna Garshina, whom he had visited on the errand reported in -- inquiring in Moscow about Medyntseva's capital and, on finding it willed only to churches, judging Suvorin's proposed letter to Plevako unnecessary. That errand closed, Chekhov's return trip to Moscow was evidently rushed enough that a further personal call on Garshina fell through, prompting this apology.