person
Kamburenok
also: камбуренок
A young Taganrog bank clerk who burst in, already tipsy on Santorini wine, during Chekhov's Easter dinner at his uncle's, boasting of his marriage and new daughter and inviting Chekhov to visit; his brother worked in a bank in Warsaw. The surname plays on "kambury"/"kamburyata," Chekhov's family slang for a local ethnic-Greek merchant type.
Reading notes
- To the Chekhovs, 7 April 1887. Taganrog. §37 if one doesn't count the Greek brokers and the sodden little Kamburenoks
Chekhov generalizes the bank clerk Kamburenok (loc. 27-28) into a type -- "kamburyata," diminutive plural, a piece of family slang mocking a certain kind of minor, tipsy, ethnically Greek-adjacent Taganrog clerk-about-town -- grouped here with "greki-maklery" (Greek brokers) as the town's only available male company for young ladies. Part of the same vein of ethnically-inflected social mockery flagged at loc. 16.