Ivan

Reading notes

• To Al. P. Chekhov, 26 January 1887. Moscow. §6 for Ivan

  A household servant, for whom Chekhov also pays a subscription installment -- a small, characteristic act of consideration folded into a letter otherwise full of brusque instructions.

• To Al. P. Chekhov, 26 June 1887. Babkino. §8 Ivan

  A household servant, given as an alternate route (besides the mail) for getting the fee money to the family at Babkino.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 28 October 1891. Moscow. §2 Ivan has just brought me the plan for the school

  Ivan is Chekhov's household servant, sent to fetch or receive the school plan on Suvorin's instructions -- Suvorin had evidently spoken to Ivan directly about it (rather than writing to Chekhov), the sort of practical errand Chekhov's servants regularly ran between the two households and offices. The "school plan" itself is not otherwise identified in this letter; given its date, its density of figures, and its place in a run of letters to Suvorin concerned with famine-relief bookkeeping (cf., two days earlier, on the Rzhevskaya school's contribution to the "Novoye Vremya" relief fund), it most plausibly belongs to that famine-relief accounting rather than to the earlier Sakhalin textbook commission, which by this point had already moved past the planning stage into shipping and payment (cf., a Sakhalin schoolbooks payment inquiry from mid-November). The identification is probable, not certain -- the source text names no institution.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 28 October 1891. Moscow. §2 after conferring with Ivan

  A small, characteristically wry touch: Chekhov frames the decision to carry the plan to Petersburg in person, rather than mail or summarize it, as the fruit of a consultation with his own servant -- treating the household errand-runner as a co-deliberator in a piece of business that will spare Suvorin a tedious read.